After having a week off walking Holly started to get seriously wobbly, it wasn't helped by some rather nasty cold and icy weather that made it hard to walk in a straight line when all your limbs were under your control.
Poor old Holly-dog's back legs really had no idea what they doing or where they were going. Just to add to her woes her legs developed pauses. She would lift a leg to take a step and the leg wouldn't go back down. Sometimes the other leg would work it out and she would hop along on three legs for a few steps until the 'frozen' leg decided to join in the walking again. And sometimes she would fall over.
It was painful to watch and hard work to explain to all the people who kept stopping me to tell me that my dog was limping/walking on 3 legs/ had fallen over. I started to be wary of where and when we walked as I was afraid that someone was going to accuse me of animal cruelty and call the RSPCA or Police.
On more than one occasion the scarf I was wearing ended up being used as a make-shift sling to offer Holly a safety net and stop her crash landing on the ground. The first couple of times she wasn't really sure about this, but she then twigged what I was doing and if she started to get wobbly while we were out she would stop and wait for me to come and offer support.
After a few weeks of walking away from people, some swimming when the lake wasn't frozen, and some massage sessions her serious wobbles reduced enough for me to be happy walking her around people again. We still got stopped by the very observant out there who could see that something was wrong, but these were the people who when told it was cdm would ask how long, how she was coping and how I was coping all while offering all manner of treats to Holly.
Holly has never been a highly social dog, the people and animals that she knows, she knows well and she really isn't that bothered about getting to know anyone or anything else. But as she now became more and more a wobbly dog (as one lady put it "her back end has had one too many pina colada's") people started to want to make a fuss of her. It didn't take her long for the labrador side to come to the fore and work out that dog walkers usually had treats and were generous in dishing them out to a wobbly dog with a pair of big brown eyes.
I have no proof that the week off walking while I was ill kick started the serious decline, but it just seemed to be a bit too coincidental. The scientist side of me insists that coincidence is not evidence, but concedes that with one dog and one timeline it's impossible to gather valid statistical data. The over-protective dog owner side claims there is no other sensible explanation. But until the Doctor turns up with his Tardis and lets me go back and try December 2012 again the best I can say is that it was probably a contributing factor.
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