How to keep your dog's stitched up paw from getting dirty, wet or chewed on after you remove the cast...

Crochet a pretty purple sock of course!

So here's the story...I took Mazzy out front for a smoke and she was totally normal and fine. We walk in the house, she prances in like a princess and not 5 minutes later she's doing this weird, no whimper limp and kept biting at her paw. I swooped in and grabbed her from the floor, cradled her (which she hates) in my arms but couldn't get a good look, so I put her on the couch on her back and we started investigating her paw, I couldn't see anything and all the poking and prodding wasn't seeming to hurt her so Dr. Jory stepped in and found this crazy big blister looking thing in between her toes! Due to the quick change in her behavior we figured it must be a spider bite or some similar emergency. Luckily we live 1 mile from the closest Animal Hospital so we jumped in the car and sped over. According to the sign on the door, they close at 7 pm. However there were some nurses just inside who came over and opened the door, they were willing to look at Mazzy's paw because we weren't sure if this was an emergency and they didn't want us to have to pay the emergency fee at their sister hospital. They told us it wasn't a spider bite, probably a cyst or tumor of some kind, but definitely not an emergency. I made an appointment for the next day and we took Mazzy home. I placed her on the couch assuming she wouldn't want to wander around on her hurt paw, but the she jumped up and pranced off as if nothing happened. The tumor must have got caught on her nail to make her limp earlier.

Long story short...the Dr. couldn't determine what kind of tumor it was from the needle biopsy, just that it might be a soft cell tumor and could be cancer. A week later she went in for surgery, had it removed and the biopsy supposedly sent to a lab for results. I say supposedly (which I know isn't a real word) because after 3 weeks of wondering and waiting, I called to get the results and the doc says "ummm oh...um...I guess we had a miscommunication because they didn't have a biopsy listed as something you wanted to do." WTF? I'm not going to go into details, you'll be bored (probably already are)...the point is they fucked up. He said luckily for us they still had the tumor and could send it but I argued about being charged for it...needless to say he said he'd call and never has. Regardless we would never put Mazzy or any of our animals through chemo and/or radiation if we found out they had cancer. Who does that?

So we live life as normal and if we find another tumor, we'll have it removed, but otherwise we'll continue to spoil her as always and enjoy her sweet, tender loving heart as long as we're lucky to have her.

Final update...The day before we left for Moab the bandage came off and she's back to prancing around the house like a princess and humping her sister as normal.