Today has been a tough day for Nora. She has experienced brief neuropathic pain before, but only for very brief moments (3 seconds at most), and she snapped out of it immediately and went back to doing whatever she was doing before the pain struck. Today she have had several major incident of phantom limb 🙁
The first one happened on our morning walk. One second she is walking along, wagging her tail and sniffing trees – the next she is screaming/high pitch yelping and circling trying to lick her non existing leg. It lasted for over a minute!! The poor girl was so scared, and in pain. I sat down with her after, and gave her one of the pain relieving massages I found links to on this site. She loves those massages, and it calms her down as well. After about 10 minutes she tried to get up and walk again, twice, but each time she yelped and sat back down again. At that point I just wanted to get her home, so I picked her up and carried her for several blocks. She gave me many kisses while I was carrying her. After about one block of carrying her, some guy parked in an SUV rolled down his window and said mockingly to ‘put her back down and let her walk herself’….. I told him to mind his business and that the poor dog was in pain and unable to walk. At that time he saw she was an amputee, and apologized. She decided to walk the last block to our house, and to my great relief she seemed back to normal.
The second attack happened on our afternoon walk. Thankfully we were just down the block, and I carried her right back inside and put her in her bed. I called my vet, who is prescribing Gabapentin for her to use for the next month or so. In the meantime he said I could use the Tremadol I had left over from amputation and spay surgery recovery. We will also look into acupuncture, as we’ve read several articles about it being very helpful in treating neuropathic pain. Anything to avoid Nora having to experience this again….
