ness

She has had small amounts of tug for a little while and yep she is warmed up well and truely now before doing anything. I seem to spend more time warming her up then doing anything else.

Just thought I would add something to this tonight - for the first time ever I have seen some very weird hind end stiffness at bedtime. I am more than a little concerned about it because its nothing normal for her to have hind end noticeable issues .

Yep we have done some walking in the water to. I take her to a beach which is mostly dead calm and has a conveniently located sand bar. I will walk out into the water and we normally head out past the sand bar. When she has done some swimming and is slightly tired we will then just keep walking along in the water and she will walk with me so we so some of that as well. The biggest problem I am running into is she is suppose to be doing more walking up and down hills and side ways along hills and she is really reluctant. I am not sure if its pain related or because she finds it boring.

Hmmm except she also had her first 8 hour stint completely unsupervised and with free range of the yard on Friday, prior to that she has had a few hour or half hour or loosely supervised but I thought 13 weeks down the track we might be ok. I had no option as I had something that went all day and didn't think I could crate or confine her and she was otherwise fine Friday evening. I have also been slowly easing up letting her have a couple of off-leash walks so long as she is only walking and not sprinting and being a lunatic which is all fine. It was more the way she landed at the park when she bounced up at me that bothered me. She was a little over the top and I guess I have been becoming a little more relaxed because her shoulder is doing well so that is why I was stressing. She ended up having a 2 course treatment of PRP injections - first one was just before Christmas, second one was three weeks later and she has been on essentially the same rehab protocol that the specialist would use post any joint surgery except with slightly less strict confinement time. i.e. she only had 4 days after each injection. Other than that its been a gradual build up of leash walking, confinement at home, swimming her starting at 5-10 min and building. So at this stage she is getting walks/swims/doing some hill work. She had a physio appointment a few weeks ago and since then I have been somewhat less strict because the shoulder all seemed pretty good but still controlling what I can. I.e. we aren't back doing any dog sports but she will occasionally run the front fence at home. The specialists comment to me was if she does end up needing to go through it again I will be the rehab pro :laugh:. We were given the green light to introduce some weaving the other day until I mentioned she only has 1 speed of weaving FLAT OUT. So we are doing figure 8s around traffic cones instead :laugh:.

Thanks for your response coogie - Kenz has already 13 weeks down on a fairly strict rehab program anyway. She isn't doing anything in the way of twisting or turning or least we are suppose to be avoiding it as much as we can. She has only been of super strict supervision for the last few days. The majority of her exercise has been swimming and leash walks. More swimming as she prefers that over leash walking. It was during the rehab time for her shoulder with all the fairly strict confinement and leash walking that she lost some of the muscle support which made the patella issue appear much more significantly. The specialist included. At least thats the best guess of those that have examined her considering she is 4 soon enough (so not a typical age or even breed to discover a patella issue). He actually wasn't able to find the luxating patella until she had been rested for a while and the chiro vet only found it by accident when he had her up on an uneven surface. I guess that is the other reason why at this stage there is not the inclination to rush into surgery - there is some suggestion that it might improve when she is allowed back to normal activity. She was fairly active prior to the shoulder issues and the patella was a complete non issue despite her being a very high drive agility dog.

Thanks for that response aussielover - she has a very good ortho specialist who has been looking after her shoulder and who will operate on her knee if it ever is deemed necessary. He was pretty matter of fact that if the cruciate did go then he would just fix them both in the same surgery. She has already been examined twice under sedation so it was pretty much ruled out of it being a cruciate at that stage but that was back in January. I am just in super sensitive stress mode and when she comes up on three legs after she has been jumping around and lands awkwardly and its still there an hour or two later I went into panic mode as you do. Her patella issues are normally not lasting lameness which is why I stressed. I guess I am overly sensitive to hints of lameness after what has been a pretty much of a rough time.

I know there are other threads posted on this but I have a question re non-weight bearing lameness. I have been told there is an increased risk of cruciate rupture and that if she should ever come up not weight bearing on the leg then its possible she has blown her cruciate. My query is does anybody have any experience with this and how is it different to a normal "patella" episode. My young BC has a grade 2 luxating patella on her LH. We haven't had surgery on it at this stage because she is in the process of rehabbing for biceps tendonitis and other than needing to give her a life back for a while I worry about surgery on a rear leg and the additional strain it will place on her shoulder which is not yet back to 100%. Any way I had my youngster at the oval last night and we were doing recalls to her tug - something she has been given permission by the specialist to do just recently. She jump up at me and came down and wasn't weight bearing on her hind leg. Normally her patella issues are isolated to walks on leash and the occasional somewhat random skipping. It normally isn't lasting and I can normally massage her a little bit and it all seems to be fine. Last night she was unable to walk home properly and so I had to carry her home. She was crated and other than finding a few sore spots last night in her thigh/groin but this morning she was totally back to normal and weight bearing properly again. I am in part stressed because of the increased cruciate risk so I guess I am primed to look and question things. I am presuming that this latest episode was just the patella rather than any thing else. Does this sound fair enough?

:laugh: kallstar - no pennies spare to save we will get there one day though. I really do want to travel somewhere and trial again. Good luck to those trialling over the weekend - video is mandatory .

ok I am officially jealous - I have four new routines worked out and no opportunity to trial until July .

Poor Gibbs - hugs and hope he is on the road to recovery soon.

Interesting to look at the scores and see in the video that Petra's lab sat outside the box. Obviously its not considered a huge fault because they don't appear to have lost many marks. I do like there scoring system where you just lose points you don't actually fail an exercise outright especially when it comes to stays :laugh:

well done Prix and PAX.What a memorable experience.

Welcome home PAX - glad your all back safe and well. Looking forward to the video .

I don't know about jetlag in dogs but in humans can't it take a while before it kicks in so to speak. Wonder if its the same in dogs as in the dog appeared fine until after it had competed. I don't know how many days it takes before it would be noticeable or how many days they were there before competing. Its like everything is fine until all of a sudden it all catches up with you and that can be days later. Just a thought.

Here you go this is the lab that won:

I see GD got second with the little dog in the finals :laugh:.

the small dog he ran you mean. Yeah think he did :laugh:. His BC went clear though.

In the UK system the lower the score the better I think. They do it as deductions.

hmmm well we could set something up here .

:laugh: not such a stupid ideal Weasel - WA is a pretty awesome place to live .

Nawww Weasel - shoulda done law then they wouldn't do your head in

Way to go Caffy and the ever inspirational Snazz monster .

Kenz has been doing articles since she was a baby . I actually bought 3 brand new sets of articles while i was waiting for her to arrive i.e. pre 8 weeks .

Nawww saw the email - sucks would love to go but can't guarantee my little herding dog will be ready for that sort of activity by then - such a shame we missed the first one to because she was limping .

Enjoy your agility retirement Scoota . Your one very special red dog and hopefully you were spoiled rotten :laugh:.