I had a dream!

I thought for a long time that should I still take one more dog into this life, do my best in training and perhaps even compete in some sport, yes I said to myself and to my dear friend Linda, as the right combination was coming true.

Then everything fell apart!

The puppy was fetched in the evening. Next morning I slipped outside in the snow the puppy in my arms and fell. The dog's right hind leg was broken and put in a cast. The fracture healed well in two weeks and I thought that everything was fine. When the cast was taken off today,  the next day the puppy tried to jump against a sofa. The healed leg, which was still in a support bandage somehow got caught on a dog bed beside the sofa, twisted and broke again in a different place. When it happened, I thought that this is not true.

When the X-ray was taken from the leg, the orthopedist said that a CT scan is also needed and concluded from it that the dog had osteopenia, which was why the leg had broken again so easily. The puppy was 10 weeks old at that time.

This began a nightmare that lasted several months. First, there was three weeks of cast hell. The doctor's instructions were: cage the puppy, no jumping, no running, as little walking as possible. The cast must not get wet, it must be well protected when the dog is taken outside to pee and poop.

So WHAT, I thought! First of all, caging was completely impossible, because the puppy immediately jumped against the walls of the cage. A small fence was built inside. It didn't work, because the puppy immediately jumped against its walls. In the end, our small guest room became a prison, but the puppy immediately jumped against the door of it, if you left the room and closed the door. So we were in that room with the puppy in turns 24/7. The fact was that she slept so-called dog sleep, waking up immediately if we tried to leave the room. The only good thing at that time was that she slept the nights.

The puppy pees and poops several times a day. It was completely impossible to put such a protection on the cast for several times a day that the cast wouldn't get wet outside in December. If it had gotten wet, we would have had to go to the animal hospital to have it changed. The weekly, normal visits to the vet there were already enough for the puppy. In the car, the puppy drooled so much that I had to hold a towel in my lap so that I wouldn't get soaked. Well, the puppy quickly learned to do its business inside on the pee pad and it became “outside clean” for a long time.

The cast for this second fracture was as long as the hind leg and was heavy, so the vet said that it was putting strain on the other hind leg and since the dog had osteopenia, the other leg could break too.

How do you tell a 10-week-old puppy that she can't do anything?

She was able to walk somehow with the cast, so she had to be kept in a harness and on a leash the whole time so that she couldn't "run" or jump. I slept next to her at night with the leash in my hand and spent the day trying to find things to do to keep the puppy in sane. There were a borrowed rabbit`s sniffing mat, different smells, different toys, dog smells, cat smells, different puzzles, everything that my friend and I could think of. Still, the time was really long for the puppy, as a puppy she couldn't concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time. She and I got on each other`s nerves during those weeks. She took out her frustration by biting anything, me especially and I was stiff with fear every time she tried to jump or do something forbidden. We had decided that if the puppy will still have another fracture, she will be put down. The cause of the osteopenia was not clear in the beginning.

Finally, in the third week of the cast, against all the instructions we had received, we took the puppy out to our covered balcony a few times times a day for a couple of minutes. It helped a little my own and the puppy's head.

That fracture healed in three weeks, as predicted. A support bandage was worn for a week after that. The leg was as thin as a stick, without muscles and without strength, as it always is after a cast. We were allowed to walk her outside for 5 minutes at a time at first. Short distances and short times in weeks. Only in May when the dog was seven months old did we have permission from the orthopedist for normal one-hour walks and to keep the dog loose.

I was already completely exhausted at that time and it showed in my appearance.

When I wrote that my dream was crumbling, it was crumbling as a sum of many things. We had to visit the Animal Hospital every week. Its waiting room was scary for a small puppy with its barking dogs. Every visit to the vet went so that we were directed to the examination room and left there. Then after a while a vet or student came and stopped in front of us, started asking questions and then the cast was removed and the leg checked, sometimes they took X-ray and then the cast was put back on. Certainly not very pleasant or painless for the dog. Many negative things happened, which I will not go into here and which I as the owner could not influence.

The end result is that the dog refuses to come through the door of the animal hospital. Also during walks people who did stop in front of us and start talking to us were really suspicious in her opinion. Otherwise, she was not interested in people who passed us during walks or was not scared of them. I interpret her behavior that she is not afraid of people in the first place, a situation similar to a visit to the vet clearly triggers a negative memory in her. In these situations, it takes a while for her to note nothing negative is happening and then she is relaxed and people are ok. This is how traumas are created I suppose.

It also took a long time for her to trust that touching her paws does not mean anything negative or painful. Even I was not allowed to touch them, she pulled the paw away immediately. Cutting nails is even now not without problems.

So the socialization period was spent in the prison of the guest room. When we should have met new people and a lot, other dogs, visited different places, we could not go anywhere. My friends Anne. Nina and Hanna managed to help us week after week by visiting in addition to the family. I am so grateful to them for that. They are important people for the now one-year-old dog.

When the dog was already a little older and was big enough to jump into the car, the jumping there had to be trained for weeks. She hated the car. I could have forced her up there, but I wanted her to want to jump in there herself. I am happy I had the patience as now she loves to be in a car and jumps in there without problems. For this, I have to thank my friend Hanna, who taught me impatient person patience.

You can also believe how happy a person can be when a dog pees and poops outside for the first time and gradually moves from being outside clean to being inside clean.

Walks are still challenging. The dog is also game-loving and feels like it's walking with its nose, not with me. Rabbits, hare, foxes and deer live in this area. So she easily pulls and wanders from side to side when walking. We've tried stopping, turning and other common methods. It remembers for a moment and then the nose takes her away again. Maybe the philosopher's stone can be found somewhere for that too.

However, the thing that makes life the most difficult at the moment is platform shyness. We went to a kennel camp in Sweden when the dog was eight months old. She thought the car deck of the ship was suspicious and slippery and of course she slipped on it with her long nails and since then she has had difficulty walking on what she thinks is slippery. This problem did not exist before that slipping in the boat. This makes it difficult for me to go with her to shopping malls, cafes or similar, which would be useful for her.

She will be one year old on October 13th. Despite everything that has happened, she is a very happy, very playful and very wild junior. She is also stubborn :). She will not grow to be a dog to compete with, she will not become a show dog, she may not even turn out to be the most confident one. She will not become the dog I dreamed of to compete with.

It is said that you may not get what you want, but you always get what you need.

I needed this beautiful love package and I love her!