Lots going on pet-wise in our household in the last month.
First, Zelda was diagnosed with a soft tissue sarcoma on her leg, and my vet wasn't confident about being able to remove it completely because of the location. I took her to a local specialty practice and the surgeon proposed an aggressive surgery. The end result was that he successfully removed it completely (although with a thin margin on the under-side), so the prognosis is pretty good, at least statistically. In this type of surgery, the incision is too large to close with sutures and it has to heal as an open wound, so we have been changing bandages every few days for the last month. The healing has been going well, but very slowly ... as expected. Interestingly, about a week ago, they started using a new technology called
Jumpstart, which is a high-tech wound dressing that has miniature electrochemical cells printed into the bandage and generates small electrical currents that stimulate healing. The results have been almost miraculous in just a week, with 5mm of healthy tissue forming around the entire circumference of the wound. If this keeps up, it will cut the remaining healing time in half. In the mean time, she has this big bandage on her leg at all times and is wearing a cone when not supervised. She can only go outside briefly on leash to do her business, so it has not been a fun time for her, but we are giving her a lot of love.
The other big news is a new addition to the family. Also about a month ago, right around the time I got Zelda's diagnosis, my neighbors (a married couple with two young children) stopped me on the street and told me that they had decided to give up their dog Max, and were taking him back to the shelter that afternoon. I was shocked. They had adopted him as a puppy and he had been in their family for a year and a half. I pressed them for the reasons they were giving him up, and they all seemed like really minor issues to me. He is a very sweet dog, but I guess he is too much for them. I asked them if they could hold off long enough for me to talk with my wife about adopting him. To make a long story short, I got them to agree to keep him for a few more weeks, so that Zelda could get through the surgery and the initial healing, and then we adopted him. We have had him for about a week now, and he is fitting in really well, and with a more structured and disciplined environment, his minor behavioral issues (e.g. stealing food off the counter, barking for attention) are already 95% fixed. Here are some photos.
