Setter with soft tissue injury

K

KsHusker

Active member
Ive got a setter who will be 5 in a couple weeks.

Anyways, a little background on the issue shes having. New Years day I took her out and went out solo for about 5-6 hours of hunting. She ran really well, covered a lot of ground and tore up her back pad (on the rt frt foot) on a rock. The best description I can give to the injury is that it was similar to "skinning" your knee if you ever wrecked your bike or fell on concrete, except the injury area was very very small, maybe the size of 2 pencil erasers.


I didnt hunt her for 10 days and it seemed to heal up. I went out on another weekend hunt and she irritated and agitated the area again. I let her rest, all seemed good.


Now fast forward to the end of our KS Bird season -- Jan 25-Jan 28th I went hunting with her. It was just us solo, and one day we didnt hunt much due to it being hot and very windy. She was limping a bit and I figured it was due to the pad, so I had bought some mushers wax and was waxing her paws religiously everyday. It seemed to help her.

She'd be sore at the end of our hunts as would I and I figured any favoring she did on her foot was due to the pad...it was very minimal favoring if any.

At some point towards the end of our 4 day hunt, I could have swore I saw her fall into a hole and kind of flip over, but couldnt tell for sure due to the cover. Shortly after I saw this I saw her up running and covering the field just fine. So figured all was good. If I remember this was on the last day of our hunt.


Anyways a couple days after I get home, the dog is limping...limping pretty bad. It seems to get better at times over the past month and I have limited her activity. I do not let her do anything besides go outside, go down the deck and maybe fart around for a few minutes then she comes back in to lay by my desk (I work from home). (Live in town so unfortunately do not have a large back yard)

The pad is healed as far as I can tell, however the limp persists. Im afraid she may have tore something or injured it permanently and that its my fault. I just thought if the dog didnt want to hunt or was hurting pretty bad she'd let me know. She never really gave these signs other than being a bit sore at the end of the day on our long hunts which I thought was normal.

At the vets office he guessed it was a soft tissue injury in her front elbow area, however he couldnt tell for sure. I had thought maybe something got in her pad and embedded itself, however I can squeeze all I want on all of her toes and get no reaction. I dont even get much of one as I move further up but like the vet got a tad bit in the elbow shoulder area.


I know I have a long winded post, but am worried I did something to permanently hurt the dog. Im fine with her being a pet but I would find it a hard pill to swallow if my actions (keeping up the 4 day hunt we went on) ruined her permanently and made her lame.

Id figure almost a month removed from this hunt she'd not favor the leg anymore. Is there something I could be missing? Like I said Im not positive if she fell in the hole or not, or if something has been embedded in the pad (definitely no signs) or if maybe she was favoring the injured pad and as a result got a severe sprain and Im just not patient enough to let it heal.

She just limps a slight bit and if I leave her out to play in the yard for a while to get some exercise she will come in later or the next day and seem to limp (or walk with a gimp) more.


Do these types of injuries just take forever to heal? Am I not being patient enough or could there be something more wrong? I didnt have an xray done as money is a little tight due to a baby around the corner but do have the funds for it. Vet just thought it might be a bit premature as he couldnt find anything that indicated it was serious.

Thanks for reading and in advance of your responses.
 
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as you probably know many soft tissue injuries take a more advanced modality to diagnose (mri,ultrasound, etc). Radiographs are a good start but may not be diagnostic and yes the bill adds up quickly. My personal lab had a similar history and it took an mri to diagnose a biceps tendon injury near the shoulder. In my practice I tell clients we have to identify our enemy before we know how to attack. Is there an Ortho specialist in the area for a referral visit? I am afraid until you have a specific diagnosis all this board talk including mine (30 years in veterinary practice) is speculation. Will be very interested to hear how this goes, please let us know.
 
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John,

I interned the summer between my junior/senior year in veterinary school (Kansas State) at Driggs Veterinary Hospital. Tim Lewis was the vet I worked for and who started the clinic ( sadly he got killed in a horse wreck the next summer). That was in the mid-eighties, bet I wouldn't recognize the place now.
 
they were the only vets around then, next was in Jackson. Covered the golden triangle of Driggs, Tetonia and Victor.
 
First off, I don't think you should beat yourself up any further, although I understand why you feel that way. Our dogs are working dogs. Sometimes they get hurt. They are also incredibly enthusiastic about their jobs, and incredibly stoic when it comes to pain, so it can be difficult to the point of impossibility to detect injuries during hunts. In particular, soft tissue injuries seem to "flare up" when the dog cools down. Medically speaking, I agree with the previous reply that it's likely nothing to do with the pad abrasion. If I were in your place I'd get the xrays done, because they're cheap compared to MRI and other soft-tissue scans, and can show displaysia or other bone disorders of the forlimb or even the cervical spine. What does your vet say about trying an anti-inflammatory like metacam or deramax? My dog suffers from the same symptom (difficult to diagnose forelimb lameness). We did the xrays first to rule out elbow displaysia, and that showed some arthritis in the cervical vertebrae that could be pinching nerves. As a result we tried gabapentin (nerve calming) but that didn't work, so we tried the antiinflamatories mentioned above, which didnd't work either. In any case, my own dog's issue is not the question here - I only mention it as a suggestion of a way to try different meds to try to help to diagnose if it's an inflammation or a nerve issue. If both of those don't work then you might have narrowed it down to a tendon issue, as there are (or so my vet tells me) a complex of four tendons in the shoulder that can get very inflamed, but the antiinflamatories don't help much because tendons are poorly vascularized, so the meds don't get to them. If it appears that is the case, the can try to illicit a pain response by pushing on the various tendons, and if the dog jumps or yelps then they might choose to inject the tendon with cortisone, which requires anaesthetic to do (they put the dog to sleep, shave the shoulder, and then jab the tendons full of cortisone). That said, if you've got a baby on the way, all those treatments can add up to a fair bit of money, so I think that it would also be a good approach to just follow your vet's advice and to continue resting/gentle exercise for your dog to see if it calms down on its own before startign with the xrays. In my dog's case, we got as far as the last step (cortisone injections) and we had to wait two full weeks to flush the metacam fully out of her system before doing that, and she just got better for some unexplained reason (but I'll take it!) so we never had to do the cortisone injections. So don't lose hope - just like the abuse that we put our own bodies sometimes causes an ache or pain that has us gimped up for a while before it calms down, so to can that happen for dogs.
Keep us up to date and don't beat yourself up,
All the best,
-Dave
 
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