A Healing Vacation

After the wildfire, evacuation, and my string of bad migraines, we decided that we needed a serious break from everyday life. We packed up the LabMobile, including all of R's rehab devices, and we headed to the Crested Butte area of Colorado. We camped above 11,000', and we had many lakes around us for most of our days there.

It was exactly what we needed, and it also seemed to be what R needed to get stronger. We'd felt like his post-surgery improvement had slowed down a lot. Before the trip, he was still limping almost daily, and we were nervously controlling his activity to make sure that he didn't hurt himself. Ironically, our vet was encouraging us to increase his activity even more despite the limping because she thought that the limp was simply a "habit" rather than a sign of pain. I'm embarrassed to admit that we'd been afraid to actually follow her advice.

But, in Crested Butte, we had lakes galore. We let R play as if he'd never had elbow surgery. He was the happiest dog in the world. His limp vanished despite intense activity like this leap off the shore of a lake.

After the first day of letting him play around the lakes with no restrictions, I held my breath, watching to see if his gait got worse. It didn't!!!! So we played more!

In between multiple swimming (and diving) sessions per day, R went on progressively longer trail runs with the Runner. He still didn't limp!

I was doing his intensive rehab with him every day in our campsite, and he seemed to be getting stronger at an incredible rate. I'm going to share an update on his rehab soon.

By the end of our trip, we humans felt sure that we'd made a good decision when we chose CUE surgery for him back on April 15.  We hadn't seen him walk with no limp in a couple of years before this trip.

His sister was thrilled to have him playing with her again.

I'll tell you more about our trip in future posts but I had to share this very happy highlight first!