Sariah at Nine Months

Sariah loves to be wherever we are and as close to us as possible.  She will sit on our feet or half climb on to a bed or couch to put her face or a paw near us.  She loves running on the trail with Kelly or running in the park with other dogs.  She definitely needs to run every day or she goes a little stir crazy.  She loves bones from the pet store and expends a lot of energy pulling them apart and chewing on them.

During Kelly's and Heather's backpacking trip, Sariah's exercise was my responsibility for a couple of days.  I took her down to the spot where Kelly lets her run up and down the rocks.  I thought that would be better than just walking her.  She bounded up and down the rocks having a ton of fun.  During her romp, I heard a glass bottle scatter down the rocks, but didn't think anything of it. There is a lot of broken glass where these rocks are, but normally it's not a problem for her.  This day, however, the glass was a problem.  I noticed blood pooling around her paw when she came to sit by me.  Pooling is the proper word because there was literally a pool of blood forming very quickly.  I couldn't see what the exact injury was, but we needed to get home fast.  She left a blood trail as we walked back to the car, blood was all over the car when we got home, and there was plenty of blood in our driveway as I examined her.  I finally figured out that the large pad on her paw was slice almost in half.  I cleaned the wound with water and alcohol before wrapping gauze, around it and securing it with a sock and painter's tape so she couldn't get at it.  Of course Kelly was out of cell phone range, so I had no idea if I should take her in for stitches, and the problem was exacerbated by it being a Saturday after hours.  I ended up taking her to a 24-hour emergency vet where she received 3 stitches.  They actually liked my gauze/sock/painter's tape patch job which kept the wound clean.  Sariah came home sleepy and dressed up with a cone.  We took the cone off thinking she'd be okay, and by the next afternoon she'd ripped off the bandage and eaten out one of the stitches.  She got the other two stitches out the next day making our $200 vet visit a waste of time.  We kept her wound clean and wrapped for a week until it started to heal, and Kelly helped that process by using some glue to try and keep it closed (she licked this off, but we were persistent enough to see it through to healing).  Fortunately she didn't seem to be in pain, and she was back on the trail within a few days dressed up in the sock and painter's tape contraption. What a month!