My days have become centred around morning and evening update calls from Dr. Stephanie Conroy of Northside Vet Specialists.  Dr. Stephanie is caring for Ziva during the day at Northside Emergency Vets where she has been since Saturday evening. This morning’s update was a call for help to see if I could get Ziva to eat. She had eaten for the doctor on Tuesday morning, her first since being admitted, but hadn’t eaten since then. Her vitals are good, stable, she had some physio-therapy this morning, but she seems to be very anxious at the hospital. I readily agreed to come help.

None of us have seen Ziva since Saturday night and I suppose I am the one that has taken all of this the hardest. I am still quite stunned at the severity of her injury but mostly at my inability to handle it when it happened. I pride myself on being levelheaded and able to handle stressful situations but Saturday night when Warren woke me from a sound sleep to tell me Ziva had hurt herself, I seriously assumed I’d go out there and fix her right up. Never in my wildest dreams did I expect to find my baby at the bottom of our hilly backyard, terrified and dragging the whole back half of her paralysed body. There would be no flick of a switch fix for this one, Susan. This was an horrific nightmare that was just beginning and I was completely out of my league. I floundered, I flopped, I screamed, I all out panicked, and inside I was the most terrified I had ever been in my life. Not only did I not know what to do but I could not take control on my own like I normally do. Ziva is a 36.5kg (80lb.) Golden Retriever that is solid muscle to the core and at least half of her is now dead weight. I couldn’t pick her up on my own and carry her uphill; hell, Warren could barely do it but together we got her upstairs and inside the house.

There was no blood anywhere, she wasn’t frothing at the mouth (which could indicate a paralysis tick) and she absolutely refused to lay down and take the weight off of her front legs. In that moment, I had not a clue what to do so I did what any mother does in these situations; I gathered her between my legs and into my arms and just held her as tight as I could. Somehow I would figure out what to do; at some point, something would come to me but until then I was going to hang onto her for dear life to let her know I was there and to keep her from slipping on the hardwood floor.

Eventually I screamed for Warren to get my phone from our bedroom and when he returned, I realised I had not one single clue who to call. Not one…not one person’s name came to my mind, not one organisation, just one thought kept going through my mind, “I don’t fucking know what to do! WHY don’t I know what to do?” And then I realised I could call our vet’s office and get an emergency number off of their night recording. I mistakenly called the vet’s mobile number and when his voice mail picked up, I cussed a little more, hung up and dialled the main office number. Thankfully Dr. Pete of Two By Two Vet actually picked up the phone – how that worked at 10:30pm on Saturday evening, I don’t know but I’ll ask him next time I see him. I couldn’t even talk straight, I couldn’t even get the words out correctly, but thank God Pete understood me and told me to take Ziva to NEVs. He had to repeat it FOUR times and I had to actually write it down because every time he said it and I repeated it, my brain forgot the name. Those that know me know my short term memory is something I pride myself on – well, in times of trauma, it quits working.

We eventually got Ziva in the car. Thank God for Warren’s brute strength and my fumbling fingers that painstakingly programmed the NavMan with the address I had Googled. Thank God also for wonderful and amazing places and people like NEVs – Northside Emergency Vets and the Northside Veterinary Specialists. After passing the building once because there were no lights, turning around in an abandoned parking lot and driving the wrong way on the wrong side of the street to get back to the parking lot I had passed, these incredible human beings from inside this unmarked building came out with a stretcher (which Ziva wanted no part of,) eventually abandoned the stretcher and physically picked up Ziva and whisked her inside to immediately start the emergency care she so desperately needed.

It has been a very long four days of waiting, waiting on the phone call in the middle of Saturday night to hear it wasn’t any kind of toxin or poison: the snake bite kit had come back negative. On Sunday waiting on the phone call from the specialist who had examined Ziva, he determined a spinal injury had caused her paralysis and he wasn’t sure she would walk again because she didn’t have deep pain reaction on the right side of her body. Waiting on another specialist to do a CTScan, she found an abnormality in Ziva’s lower spine and it was best to call in the surgeon to do emergency surgery while she was still under anaesthesia. Waiting on the surgeon to call after surgery, he said her injury was far more severe than any of them had thought, that her ruptured disc had shot out like a cannonball through her spinal cord causing a large bolus of blood to form and press on her nerves but that he was able to repair everything. The surgeon telling us that we needed to wait and let nature take its course but that if she got the deep pain reaction back in her left paw like she had before surgery, then he would consider it a success. Waiting and waiting to hear if Ziva could feel the deep pain in her left paw and to be rewarded with the news that not only did she feel it in the left but she she felt it in the right…we had a miracle on our hands!

So now my days are spent waiting on my morning and evening update calls from Dr. Stephanie. I can’t get much done on a daily basis. I tend to break down and cry often, my imagination gets the best of me and my worry about my baby can literally take my breathe away. I’ve never felt more helpless, more out of control and completely useless than I have this week. So when Dr. Stephanie asked me to come down and see if I could get Ziva to eat, I readily agreed. Finally! Something for me to do! I took all of her favourite foods, her treats and and even a peanut butter treat filled frozen Kong. I was prepared and I was ready. I schooled myself not to expect anything from Ziva, not to expect our usual happy go lucky Ziva but to just BE there for her – a taste of home, to let her know we missed her. So here is a video of my first, VERY LONG OVERDUE VISIT with Ziva:

The visit was difficult and I left feeling bereft. She still cannot be comfortable laying down on her side, but once there I immediate sprawled on the floor next to her and began scratching her in the places I knew she loved. It took her a solid twenty minutes to finally calm down, stop shaking, and begin to breathe through her nose. Her anxiety level is high and her inability to make her back legs do what she wants causes her great stress. So the two of us just lay there on the floor of the hospital room and I calmly talked to her about what has been happening at home while she slowly calmed her breathing. I eventually offered her a few niblets of roo, and low and behold she gobbled them up. She probably ate about 10 niblets of roo, each the size of maybe a small vitamin. She also drank most of the bowl of water Nurse Hannah brought to her. After that, she wanted nothing to do with food. She had refused cooked chicken from Dr. Stephanie earlier this morning and now she wouldn’t even lick the melted peanut butter from the Kong off my finger.

As she began to get agitated again, I stopped everything and we went back to just laying next to each other, me scratching and talking, and her slowing her breathing. I told her there were a few things she needed to do in order to come home. Her catheter had been removed that morning also, so weeing on her own was a big to-do. Eating was another one which she could continue to work on after I left the hospital. I don’t think her tummy feels well and Dr. Stephanie agreed she might need some anti-nausea and reflux meds to help her. Mainly I talked and I’m hopeful she listened. I have to view her as a trauma patient who has lost the use of her legs and is terrified…because essentially that’s who she is. She has a long road of recovery ahead of her, rehab, physio, lots of exercise, hopefully lots of acupuncture and whatever else we find that will help her. This is our second child and we will do whatever it takes to help her walk again, no matter what.

Here are some pictures from my visit. The first is her “not very happy face but it’s definitely her BRAVE face,” the second one is our failed carpet picnic and the third is her surgery dressing. Please keep Ziva and the Smith family in your thoughts and prayers. Her medical bills are tremendous at the moment but we are holding our own. Many have encouraged us to do a GoFundMe page and if it comes to that, I’ll let you know. Right now, good thoughts, steadfast prayers and loving vibes towards Ziva are most needed. Cheers, Susan