After about 12 days my caregiver friend left. I’d moved back upstairs and was going to physical therapy two days a week and seemingly progressing from the surgery. Then three weeks into the rehab, the bottom part of my leg caught fire. From my knee to my ankle the nerves erupted to the point where anything touching the skin—hand, clothing, bedding—turned on the electricity. What the fuck? My physical therapist didn’t know what to do about it, just that it had to be a nerve reaction to the surgery. It hurt so much at therapy that I couldn’t do my exercises and one of the other therapists told her to just massage it. Which hurt like hell.
Paco’s confusion turned into anxiety attacks, or at least that’s how I interpreted them. All of a sudden he would jerk his head and look straight out, as if there’d been a loud noise somewhere that grabbed his attention. Then came the panting and trembling and the pawing—on anything near him, including me. At night while I struggled to sleep with my leg hanging out from the bed covers Paco would have an attack and start pawing me or the dresser next to the bed, endlessly. We spent many sleepless nights as I struggled to calm him down by petting him, talking to him, or in despair, tying him up on the leash where he couldn’t do any damage. The dresser is scarred with his paw marks. I made an appointment with the vet.
I called my son Max and he came home to help me. The nice vet at the office where I’ve gone for years in Taos listened to our description of Paco’s behavior, asked a few questions, and said, well, what I think Paco is experiencing is cognitive dysfunction syndrome, which is essentially dog Alzheimer’s. The attacks that we were witnessing were signals in his brain setting off the anxiety and confusion. We went home with $67 worth of gabapentin, the go to drug for just about anything, and the advice that if he continued to decline he’d write a prescription for Prozac.
We didn’t have to get a prescription. When one of our neighbors heard the diagnosis she came over with what looked like a year’s supply of it. I didn’t ask why she had so many, just thanked her.
In the meantime, I saw the surgeon who told me the peroneal nerve in my leg must have been damaged during the nerve block (a nerve block, which if you recall from my previous blog post, didn’t block the pain in my knee post surgery) and that considering my orthopedic history—it took me a year to recover from surgery for a bone spur in my wrist that froze my shoulder—I was an “at risk” patient. He finally put me on lyrica, the drug everyone goes to when gabapentin doesn’t work. We gave the rest of my gabapentin to Paco.
Paco’s drugs worked. He’s much calmer, with only an occasional episode. Max walks him and his dog Anka twice a day. My drugs, on the other hand, haven’t worked. One of my La Jicarita readers sent me St. John’s Wort tincture and oil to try to settle my damaged nerves. Another friend told me to take a much higher dosage of lyrica than what the surgeon prescribed. So that means an appointment with my primary doc.
It's endless. Now I have to bake cranberry bread for Christmas gifts for neighbors and get through Hanukkah—I gave up Christmas years ago—with the grandkids. But the question remains. Will I ever walk again without pain and resume a life limited by age but undergirded by years of physical activity. That post is for next year. Happy New Year everybody.
