My 5 year old corgi (let’s call him Llewellyn) woke up on January 6, paralyzed from the “waist” down. The previous day started out like any other, with a trip to the dog park; but he was lethargic in the afternoon, and that night he couldn’t jump up on the sofa. But walked to bed (in his crate).
We rushed him to the emergency vet where they said it was a ruptured disc, confirmed by MRI. He had surgery to repair his spinal cord on January 7.
We’ve since learned that some breeds – corgis, dachshunds, French bulldogs among them – are prone to Inter-Vertebral Disc Disease (IVDD), where the disc degenerates and ruptures.
Since then he’s been recovering, oh so slowly. (We’ve been informed that spinal cord nerve cells regenerate at the rate of 1 mm per day.) He gets physical therapy twice a week, and acupuncture 2x a week as well. He now has some motor function in his legs, and they’re getting stronger – if we help him to a standing position he can hold it there for a few minutes (with a little support to keep him from wobbling.) He can hoist his rear end to a kneeling position but can’t quite get to where his paws are flat on the floor. Part of his PT is to walk on an underwater treadmill – the therapist sits on a stool behind him and manipulates his legs to simulate walking, while he grinds away determinedly with his front.
Llewellyn scootches around the house with his front legs, dragging his rear like a seal, at a surprisingly good pace. But we don’t let him do it too much – it scrapes the top of his paws, and it also could lead him to think that this is the normal mode of locomotion now.
As far as his mental state goes: who knows what’s going on his little doggy brain, but he seems perfectly normal and happy. We got a wagon, and take him around on his old walk route and let him scootch around on the grass in our neighborhood park-let and he seems to enjoy that.
We’ve been told that if we put him on wheels he’d be happy as a clam. But we don’t want to do that too soon: once he gets on wheels he’d no longer be interested in learning how to walk again.
The biggest hassle is bladder/bowel control: he has very little. So he wears a diaper (actually a belly band that goes around his midsection, covering his penis). In addition to changing the band periodically we need to express his bladder, since we can’t be sure if he’s completely emptying it, and if not he could get a bladder infection. “Expressing” just means laying him on his side on a pee pad and pushing on his abdomen, and voila.
We’ve not received any guarantees that he will recover fully. We’re just keeping all fingers crossed, doing everything we can, and making offerings to the Good Doggie gods.
If anyone has any thoughts on “special needs” dogs, or can share a “my manicurist’s nephew had the same thing happen” I’d love to hear it.