Bummer.

Sunday morning I was grounded at home since I was on call for work.  It was a short call shift, only until the afternoon.   I spent the time doing some house cleaning...

And as soon as I was released from call I took the girldogs out for a short hike at the local reservoir.  I wanted to hide a new geocache ("There Will Be Mud!"), and the girls and I did the short little loop hike around the reservoir.  I kept Molly leashed most of the time.  She tends to blast around and chase things and generally annoy me when she is off lead so I like to keep her under control.  I left her off for roughly two minutes, and during that time I could hear Perri screaming through the woods while she tried to keep up.  I could hear her crazed panting and her earth pounding gallop as she flew back and forth on the trail and into and out of the reservoir.

From there we went to another local hike.  I wanted to give the girldogs a good long walk so that Molly would be a Good Girl in agility class on Monday, and I wanted to find some geocaches.  We hiked for probably 90 minutes total, we climbed up to a vista.  We had a great time.

When we got home I cleaned out all the thorn tears on Molly's forelegs and under her paws and on her belly.  I wrapped her arms up so the neosporin could work its way into the wounds before she licked it off.  Business as usual.  Molly is berserk in the woods.

The next morning she was limping.  I did not think much of it, Molly limps from time to time and gets over it pretty quickly.  She is a very dramatic dog.  I even found a small spine in her paw pad from one of the chestnut seeds that our tree drops in our front yard everywhere and thought that was the cause.  She came to work with me...but when we went to go to agility class she was still limping.  Unusual.  I really looked her foot over then.

She was limping because her toenail was badly damaged.   The nail is cracked all the way into the skin on both sides.  The bottom of the claw looked...weird to me.  I soaked her foot in epsom salt water and smeared more neosporin on it.  When I looked it over in the morning, I knew we would need to go to the vet.  There was dirt in the toenail, beneath the cracked claw.  An infection waiting to happen.

We went to our new vet today and had a pretty good experience.  I did not love the new vet, but I did not dislike her either.  I know that I need to keep searching for a more holistic practice, but today was not the time for that.  Molly was treated with a lot of love, humor and she was most certainly taken care of medically.  The toenail was trimmed and cleaned as much as possible, and wrapped up.  She will have a recheck on Thursday.  The vet says that the bottom of the nail is completely torn and is flaking off bit by bit.  They could not get the dirt cleaned out entirely, and Molly is on antibiotics to control infection and the vet feels that as the nail grows and heals, the dirt will push out.  Splendid.

"Dying.  I am Dying."

Most sadly, Molly will not be able to run agility this weekend for the CPE trial.  The hosting club was so very kind enough to let me move Perri into Molly's run slots, so Miss Poodle will be doing her first ever full CPE weekend.   I hope she wants to play with me that much!  I am feeling a little weird about this.  It just won't be quite the same without my big, naughty girl.

She is officially never allowed off leash again.  She uses her freedom for evil purposes!