[Dailydrool] Young Charlie's charley horse

[Elizabeth Lindsey]

Yesterday I wound up making a trip to the vet with young Charlie who  
started limping on Monday night. We gave him a day to see if he might  
work it out on his own, but he was still limping and not putting  
weight on his right rear foot by yesterday morning, so in we went.  
Ken said as we left that he'd always thought it'd be Charlie's  
deformed front feet (backyard breeding will show) that would send him  
to the vet, not a back foot.

The vet started poking and pulling and noted that Charlie seemed to  
feel pain in his bone. That is not a good thing.

I spent a very long seven minutes thinking all kinds of horrible  
thoughts while Charlie was in the back having his leg x-rayed. He's  
only two-and-a-half, but they say the good always die young and young  
Charlie is a very, very good guy despite his intentional naughtiness.  
Here we've been so worried about how Charlie will fare after our  
Elsinore, who's four or five years older, dies, but now Charlie might  
be the one dying first. If Charlie has bone cancer, then we'd want to  
immediately take him to our state's vet school, which is three hours  
away. I wonder how soon they could see him? What kinds of decisions  
might we have to make for bone cancer? Should we try acupuncture for  
pain relief? I so enjoy my little boy, who every morning wants to sit  
on my lap when I'm at my desk and put his head on my shoulder and go  
to sleep for half an hour while I read the online news, gently  
snoring in my ear, the toddler I was never able to have. Who will  
tear up our magazines and raid the paper recycling box when Charlie's  
gone? Who will bring me toys to play with whenever I try to get the  
laundry folded? Who will chase the cats out of the backyard for me?  
How will I bear to work without Charlie sleeping on the dog bed on  
"his" half of "our" desk? How ever will I explain to Elsinore what's  
going on and why Charlie's no longer with us?

The vet came back with Charlie gimping gamely along behind him.  
There's Charlie's x-rayed rear end projected on the computer in and  
the vet starts making ominous sounding mutterings. But I've done my  
thinking, I cross my fingers that the University of Tennessee at  
Knoxville's vet school is even half as good as our Jane's Purdue, and  
I'm ready for what he's going to say. What he says is "iliopsoas,"  
which is a surprise--and does not contain the dreaded suffix "sarcoma."

It turns out that what young Charlie has is a pulled interior muscle,  
the iliopsoas muscle that lets him extend his hind leg out when he  
walks forward. I was absolutely weak-kneed with relief. In fact, I  
was so relieved that Charlie has only a strained muscle that I almost  
didn't mind paying the $156 bill for that visit. The vet school care  
I was envisioning was going to cost a whole lot more than that.

The vet said he thinks what led him to suspect bone pain was that  
when he was examining Charlie's femur and hip joint, he was at the  
same time pulling the leg out a little, and the pain Charlie  
exhibited was from his leg being pulled, not poked. It was a  
"referred pain," as the vet put it. The vet also said that the x-ray  
shows Charlie's back end is in excellent shape, which is pretty  
miraculous considering his less-than-responsible breeding. He shows  
no signs of arthritis in his hips, and the part of his spine that  
shows in that x-ray looks perfect.

So what started out as a heart-stopping examination ended up as a  
celebratory one. Would that they all went that way!

Charlie's now on half an Aleve twice a day until he stops limping,  
he's to stay quiet and not go on any walks or to the dog park for a  
few weeks, and he's going to have to endure Ken's bad (and  
inaccurate) jokes about "young Charlie and his charley horse"  
indefinitely.

Elizabeth