Broken Trophy

Trophy really did break himself this time.

Saturday I was waking up from a post-flyball practice nap (hey - running Demo is EXHAUSTING) when my mom runs upstairs and tells me Trophy is bleeding profusely dad is holding him and I need to go RIGHT.NOW.

He had caught himself on the kennel below as he jumped out of his penthouse suite and ripped out his entire nail from the outside toe on his left foot.  I'm not talking broke it off at the base, I'm talking tore the entire thing out of his foot.

So off to my totally awesome vet.  It's a half hour away, but the prices are awesome and the Doctor is awesome and they will always write me a prescription to be filled at Giant Eagle which saves me a TON on antibiotics (since they are FREE!).  So we got him cleaned up and bandaged up and on heavy doses of pain killers.  She said there is some cuticle left, so his nail will most likely grow back.

This is not a staged photo.  He would not look while I upwrapped and then rebandaged his foot today.  Poor baby is squeamish.

So he's laid up for a week. I can unwrap his foot tonight, but since I just rewrapped it this morning to check on the swelling I will probably leave it wrapped until tomorrow.  Then I have to start twice daily cleaning which I am really not looking forward to.

I might be a blessing in disguise to have him take a week off agility.  Last week he was so.not.into.it.  He did everything I asked him to, but at a snail's pace.  I don't know if he was still worn out from the flyball tournament or what, but I'm not terribly upset by him missing class this week.

 Speaking of flyball, our next tournament is in a little over 4 weeks (for some reason I was thinking closer to 3).  He should be able to return to practice two weeks from this past Saturday.  We will bandage his front feet as well as using his booties to help protect that toe and we will see how he does.  If he loses his boxturn in practice I'm going to pull him. He did so well at the tournament two weeks ago with maintaining that I would hate to lose ANOTHER 9 months into re-retraining. 

One of the blogs I read said something about how difficult it is when you have goals for your dogs.  It's so heart breaking when something happens to interrupt those goals.  That's where I'm at right now.  Trophy is my everything dog (until I get Demo up and running), and my stomach drops every time because all of my dreams rest on him.  He's really close to being ready to start competing in agility (just have to nail weave entries and get a little bit better at weaves in general), he's finally putting his heart and soul into flyball racing, and we are hoping to start dockdiving this summer (looking into sponsorships right now).  But my poor dude is such a klutz!  If anything happened to Qwill, Shiner, or Baxter of course I'd be upset, but they are already my "broken" dogs, dogs that I have no major goals with above shower with love daily, so no big deal in the long run if one of them were to lose a toenail or be laid up for a week...

Sometimes dreams and goals suck.



... just realized i should not use phrases like "need to nail our weaves" when my dog has lost a toe nail... ugh. lol.

And small update on Demo's flyball progress, we started teaching him how to pass Saturday.  he's so focused on the tug he didn't care at all (but we also used Trophy and Pan passing into him, so we will see... we will see.)  He only contemplated turning and chasing one time, but that was the first time Pan passed him, he stopped, looked at her and then came right to his tug.  good boy!