2025 Life Logs, Day 223: Shadow Update
Date: Monday, August 11, 2025
Weather: Warming Up Again; High Temp 78, Low 66 degrees F
Location: At Home on Lakeview Avenue with My Shadow, Falmouth, MA
One Goldstone is back on the Cape today. This morning, Heather took a bus from near Booth Bay to Portland and on to South Station in Boston where I picked her up. She needed to be back home to attend Select Board this evening. I jumped at the chance to go pick her up so we could have some one-on-one time to talk. Once the kids are around, that never seems to happen. It was delightful to catch up and have a little private time with my daughter!
The problem of the day was Shadow. Well, not Shadow, but Shadow’s surgical incision. Last night after my dining-in friends left, I went to Heather and Jed’s to pick Shadow up. Since I knew we were going to be going in and out of the house, there was no way I was going to be able to keep Shadow on a leash while carrying food and drinks back and forth. And until the incision is healed, I have to keep him on leash all the time. I picked him up, came home, wrote my log, and then got ready for bed. It was then that I noticed that his incision was no longer stitched together. Since I have been wearing a soft collar on him rather than the hard plastic cone given to me by the vet, I knew I was taking a chance that he could use his paw to try and rub the incision and break the stitches loose, either on purpose or by accident. It happened, and however it happened, it scared me to death to just look at it. The incision is on his eyelid, right next to his eye, and part of the incision was gaping open. I took a deep breath, put medication on the incision, and put the awful plastic cone back on him. After wearing the other collar for a week, he is a little better with the cone, but he obviously hates it. I took him to the veterinarian first thing this morning and was told that the incision will heal without doing more stitches. This just sets the timeline back a bit. They gave me a different tube of ointment to put on the incision that has an antibiotic in it (another $50) and was told to return with him on Thursday. That is when the stitches were supposed to come out, and there are still a couple of stitches in place that do have to be removed. I should never have taken the plastic cone off. Nor should I have let him off-leash in the yard a few times. Those stitches would have stayed in place if I had left the cone on. Live and learn. But it is not a good feeling to know that I have caused such great difficulty for Shadow.
