Risk Taking

Sooner or later there comes a point in time when you decide once and for all you are over keeping an active dog restricted 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Its been months and months of hard work - we are well into 12 weeks post her first injection and for all intensive purposes there has been really no appreciable lameness from her shoulder. She has been comfortably managing her increased swimming activity and even managed some pretty feral tug games in the past week with no consequence. We have introduced some fitball stuff to try and mix things up a bit and rebuild some strength.

The last 2 days she has managed a good hour session at the beach both mornings which has consisted of a high proportion of swimming, retrieving through shallow water and walking through water with a bit of leash walking on the sand for good measure. She is managing sessions on her fitball and still wanting more and more.

With all of this in mind I was in the predicament yesterday of having to go out for an extended period of time and I was mindful that at some point I need to see how she does. She has had small periods of time where I have left her at home loose and gone to the shops (although no more then half an hour) and yep there has been episodes of fence running but at this stage they seem to have not caused any issue.

So with that I took a calculated risk and left her loose last night while I was out. I didn't come home to a dog showing signs of soreness and she managed another fairly reasonable beach session this morning. She then helped me garden and has run another fitball session.

While I am easing up a little with her around the house I am still being somewhat good when it comes to activities I can control in the sense that we are still not back to any jumping related activities. I am happy enough with where we have got to and so long as she remains ok I feel I can start to relax a little at this stage.

Its been a long road to recovery and while we aren't there yet we are close :). At least she has reached a stage where she can live a somewhat normal pet dog life without being continually sore. Sure the only reason I opted to go down the PRP path with her was to get her entire life back - trialling and high impact activities and all but its not all bad. At this stage I am appreciative of the fact that I don't have to keep constant tabs on her whereabouts and can start to do some of what she enjoys without it having any implications later on.

Hopefully a return to dogsports isn't to far around the corner.