Georgie One-Foot

If you’re wondering whether George has joined a Native American tribe and taken on one of those cool names that only they can come up with, the answer is: No, he hasn’t. He’s been named “Georgie One-Foot” by his dad due to an unexpected, unfortunate and rather worrying development that took place about a week ago and we’re still dealing with at present.

What happened was that George came back from one of his morning walks looking moody. His dad, who wasn’t a happy bunny himself, said that all George wanted to do was to stand in one place, sniffing everything for ages. This is atypical for our whippet, who is normally a fast, on-the-go sniffer. After about half an hour of standing, he got told off and brought back home. Hence the moody face…

Two hours later, when George leaped off his dad’s chair (after his mid-morning snooze), he started limping. We rushed to check his leg out, as a potential injury on his long legs is a constant obsession for us. Luckily, the leg and joints proved to be all right, so we turned out attention to his pad. At a quick inspection, we couldn’t see anything, but we knew there had to be something wrong, because George didn’t want us to touch it, which was odd from a dog who loves his handshakes and doesn’t mind being handled.

A quick walk in the shower, followed by another inspection, revealed a sizeable, open, weeping wound on the side of one of his toes, in the worst location possible: between the two middle toes, where most of the pressure is applied during walking. He must have stepped on some glass and managed to scrape off the entire pad. Just great!

This discovery led to a complete change in George’s daily routine: short pavement walks once a day, no play time with his friends, no rough playing in the house, foot washes in salty water, a lot of antiseptic cream and foot bandages to stop him from licking the medicine or biting his toes. Luckily, all these seem to have worked so far and the wound is healing nicely, although it’s still got a way to go. We think it might take another week until he’ll be back to normal, but we’re making progress every day and we managed to avoid going to the vet. Not that we hate the guy or anything like that, but we didn’t fancy seeing George walk around with one of those big plastic cones attached to his neck. I don’t think he would have fancied that, either.

I won’t post a photo of the injury – yes, I have taken some! – because it wouldn’t be very pleasant to look at and might upset those of a more delicate nature. But here are two pictures of George cuddled up against his dad, feeling sorry for himself.

He looked miserable for most of last week, but has picked up a bit lately as his pad stopped hurting and he was able to hop/move about more. Hopefully, he’ll be back to his old cheeky self soon!