Hello blog world!  You may have noticed that I’ve been somewhat absent lately but I’m back!  We had a bit of a scare with Bailey earlier this month and I didn’t want to post about it until we knew what was going on.  Now we know that she’s going to be fine so I’ll give you the whole scoop.

On Monday, August 13 we noticed that Bailey seemed a bit under the weather.  When it was time for bed she was too stiff to walk up the stairs and then she stayed up all night crying and moaning.  We spent most of the night telling her she was fine (Bailey can be a bit of a baby sometimes) but by the time 4AM rolled around I couldn’t take it anymore and made the mistake of googling “dog crying in pain” or some similarly alarming phrase.  As you would expect, the internet presented me with all sorts of horrible conditions and diseases that Bailey could have been suffering from so at that point I called our local emergency animal hospital and we had Bailey in their office about 15 minutes later.

Sick Bailey looks a little bug-eyed after having her temperature taken and blood drawn at the animal hospital.

The vet examined Bailey’s back legs and concluded that she was exhibiting signs of bilateral tears in BOTH cruciate ligaments (like a human with partial ACL tears in both knees).  This was terrible and shocking news since, as far as we knew, Bailey hadn’t done anything especially stressful and we had no idea why she suddenly would be injured!

Desperate to find an alternate diagnosis, we asked the vet about Lyme Disease.  Lyme frequently causes joint pain in infected canines so we hoped this might explain her discomfort.  Sure enough, a quick blood test revealed that Bailey was positive for Lyme.  Woohoo!  I never thought that I would be happy to hear that Bailey had Lyme Disease, but given the alternative Lyme was starting to sound pretty good.

Snuggled up under a comforter trying to feel better.

The vet put Bailey on Doxycycline for a month and sent us home feeling cautiously optimistic that Bailey’s “ligament tears” might just be symptoms of the Lyme Disease.  Bailey spent the next week curled up in bed with limited leash walks while I spent the week worrying, hovering, and watching Bailey’s every move, trying to detect any signs of continued back leg pain.

After the week of forced rest was over Bailey was happy, sound, and eager to get back to normal life.  We had scratched her from a DockDogs competition on August 18 but since Bailey was clearly feeling better we decided to let her trying jumping at our club’s DockDogs event in Dover on August 25-26.  Check out my Dover Summer Splash post to see how things turned out!