Lira had her 12-week follow up exam from her stem cell/PRP treatment yesterday and we got some good news! Her knees are both stable now and not showing any signs of inflammation or thickening due to increased scar tissue. It looks like the treatment worked as hard as it was to keep her from hurting herself all over again. The only negative news is that her right hamstring is still atrophied a bit from lack of use and she is now 10# overweight from the general lack of activity and medication she’s been on.
Not that the work is done, we still have months ahead to get her all the way back into shape but should have plenty of time before pheasant season opens up and in more good news she got the OK to start fishing again. We’ll continue laser and underwater treadmill for the next 6 weeks and we’ll have one more exam at Week 18 to just double check everything. In the meantime, we have work to do on multiple fronts.
Wean off medication – One big thing is getting her off the Gabapentin/Trazadone combo she’s been on for the last 12 weeks. We started last week removing the evening doses so she was doing meds 2x a day. Over the next 6 weeks we’ll wean her off Trazadone first then Gabapentin so she will be getting a big energy boost which will be fun to contain but hopefully her walking increase will help keep her from getting too crazy.
Deal with weight – This has been a tough one. We’ve gone from 3 cups of high calorie RedPaw 32K to 1 cup of low calorie RedPaw X-Series Maintenance food, cut her treats down and still she’s been gaining weight. OK, we let her have something to chew in the evenings but she needs that. Hoping that increased activity will help a lot with this though we may need to cut food even more.
Muscle Atrophy – We’ll keep Lira on Fortetropin for another 2-3 months while continuing with rehab and increased walking plus more hills and some stairs to hopefully get her right leg looking like her left leg.
Increase walking distance – Lira is now up to two walks a day of around 30-35 minutes and we can start increasing her by 5-10 minutes a week so want to get her up to two 45-60 minute walks by week 16. At that point we’ll start adding in hills or stairs 3x a week and a small bit of trotting in the middle of her walk. If that goes well starting Week 18 we’ll do very short sprints while trotting. Week 20 will involve zig-zagging to get her used to making sharper turns and doing recall exercises off-leash. By Week 22 she’ll start adding off-leash time in her walks and by Week 24 the off-leash time will begin to increase until she’s back to walking mostly off-leash.