Advice For Suspected Foot Tendon Injury Please...

[JohnF]

Peggy's Suspected Foot Tendon Injury:

 

Peggy started limping on her right back foot last Thursday a few hours after she had come back from a run in the park. Now the ground is very hard and dry as we haven’t had any rain for a while and her ‘thundering’ flat-out foot-fall across the pitch could be heard loudly that afternoon.

I checked out her leg all the way up and down and there were no tender spots or any giving out more heat than others. The leg moved around all its joints without pain, she took weight Ok from all parts of it. There were no cuts in her toes or thorns or corns either as far as I could tell, yet she wouldn’t weight-bear easily on rough solid ground particularly gravel. So, as there had been a similar issue for a few days back in July when the ground was also rock-hard, I assumed she’d bruised the tendon that comes down under the back of the foot, and so I restricted her to slow walks on grass and avoided anything with gravel.

 

By Sunday she was a lot better and hardly limping at all. We went out and left her home that day, and when I came back in the evening I took her to the park and, as no other dogs were there, I left her off leash to sniff around. All went well but she then took-off all of a sudden and did her mad zig-zag and twirling before I could stop her. I got her back on leash and she wasn’t limping. But later that night she started favouring that foot again and limping on rough surfaces.

So… since then she’s been kept on leash and the limp has now almost gone away again, even on the road.

 

I haven’t been to the vet yet because she weight-bears OK and doesn’t seem to be in pain, but what I’d like to be able to understand, from people ‘in the know’ and/or those that have raced is: How best to treat this type of injury and for how long to heal and on what surfaces to allow her to run again? Do I for example have to wait until it rains or only go to the beach?

 

Her right foot hasn’t ‘collapsed’ either, so that’s another, factor which leads me to assuming she has bruised and/or partially stretched the tendon.

 

Peggy, now 7, was adopted at 18months after a very short racing schedule, and I’m wondering if tendon injury was the reason why… I think she has always slightly favoured that foot.

 

Any advice welcome please…

[JohnF]

I found some information about it here, but it is highly technical. Obviously Peggy is a pet greyhound and not now a commercial racer, so what should a pet owner do with that kind of injury issue? Maybe I'm being over-anxious about bruising...

 

Peggy appears to be better now and leash walks without a limp even over a gravel path

 

I suppose what I'm after is how long to restrict to lead walking and when and how to introduce off-leash running?

My present thinking is 6 weeks if it was a tendon injury, but Peggy will go crazy if she can't run at all. At least in the back garden there isn't enough distance to get up to speed.

[Batmom]

If there's no swelling, I would probably get a quick x-ray to rule out other causes. After that, it depends. If the limp is mild and/or intermittent, I'd restrict activity for 2-3 weeks and see how things go. "Restrict activity" = walking; some trotting if you're not seeing any limp at all; just no running, spinning, zooming. Usually I like to give it 1 week to 10 days after I last saw symptoms before letting the dog act like a nut again.

[JohnF]

If there's no swelling, I would probably get a quick x-ray to rule out other causes. After that, it depends. If the limp is mild and/or intermittent, I'd restrict activity for 2-3 weeks and see how things go. "Restrict activity" = walking; some trotting if you're not seeing any limp at all; just no running, spinning, zooming. Usually I like to give it 1 week to 10 days after I last saw symptoms before letting the dog act like a nut again.

 

Thanks, Batmom. That makes sense, and I've already put a flashlight out by the back door so I can make sure she doesn't spin in the back garden when let out for toilet at night. She isn't limping now but I will ask for X-Ray if she limps on it again. There were similar issues with a front wrist after running in a field earlier in the year and that took about a month. She is such a crazy dog when it comes to running and especially running when it isn't a good idea.

So much for thinking an 18-month old adoptee would have fewer racing injury issues; it's a shame you never get told why they stopped other than lack of performance.

[Guest normaandburrell]

Since she had a similar issue before, I would use that as a way to judge what to do. If she is not progressing as well as she did then, it is time to see the vet. My first grey had a chronic right front foot problem that flared up off and on for the whole time we had him. Going to the vet for a good physical exam led us to getting something called a thera-paw which he wore during flare-ups, and it completely alleviated his pain. He couldn't run when he had it on, so that was another benefit, in that it helped us limit his activity during flare-ups as well.