These Tiny Feet Were Made For Walking

This video was filmed on 6/20/2011.  You can see how much Romeo's walking has improved and it's getting better everyday.  He hardly knuckles his back feet anymore and when that does happen, he tries to right them.

Romeo had an acupuncture appointment with Dr. Hamilton today.  She was so impressed by his progress that she skipped electro-acupuncture and instead did regular acupuncture, lasering, and some lasering to his incision (there are a few stubborn scabs that are so tempting to pick off).  She gave us some new exercises to do to challenge him a bit more so that'll be good as we're pretty sure he's tired of us bouncing his back legs on the exercise ball.  Romeo sees her again at the beginning of July and then she said after that she should only need to see him about once a month or so, so that's great.  It's nice that the vets are pleasantly surprised by his progress.

I don't want to come across as tooting our own horn here or anything, but this conversation has come up with a few people and I think it's worth mentioning.  I'd like to think that part of the reason Romeo's recuperation has come along so well is because we haven't overly babied him.  I think a lot of people in this situation would baby their dog, thinking it's the best thing to do, instead of helping the dog achieve some independence.  Let's face it:  Romeo's a cute small dog and at 18 lbs he's not difficult to hoist and carry around.   It would have been easy to be, "No, no, don't strain yourself.  Let me pick you up and carry you the 5 feet you want to go."  But does that really help him?  We didn't do that.  The first couple of days home post-surgery we did that to an extent, but most of the time it was helping him use his legs either with a sling or just carrying his back end a bit if he wasn't going far.  Within the first week home, we took the attitude of "if you want to go somewhere, you need to make an effort first; you have legs and we both know you can use them."  I think helping Romeo regain his independence has helped him immensely.  If someone was carrying you around everywhere, wouldn't you stop trying after awhile?  Same thing goes with animals.  The only times Romeo gets carried are up/down stairs, up/off bed, and kennel to outside to avoid a sudden pee accident.  My advice to people in a situation like this is to really know your dog.  If they can do certain things, then encourage it and get them to (safely) do it instead of helping them to a fault (i.e. overly babying them).  Obviously, every situation is  different and you shouldn't be borderline abusive about it.  We knew Romeo's limitations and we knew when he was simply being lazy.