Itzl made it through physical therapy just fine. Even though he doesn't do this for me, he walked on all four legs for the therapist, and he walked on all four legs in the water treadmill.
The therapist showed me how to get him to use all four legs, and it's a good thing he spends so much time on top of my desk because it's so much easier for me to do those exercises with him when he's at waist height than if he were on the floor.
Here are the best pictures of the ones I took last night. My camera's an inexpensive little auto-focus so while it does OK most of the time, it doesn't always take the best pictures.
This is his physical therapist, telling him what to expect in the water treadmill:
This is him in the water treadmill before the water is added and she's adjusting the height so he doesn't leap out - something he thought about doing when he realized I wasn't the one holding his leash. It was the "Halp! Halp! I've been Stoleded!" look with the "You mean you want me to do this?" look.
It's filling with water and he has this "You're kidding me? Water? Really?" look.
The next five are just pictures of him walking in the water. They're kind of blurry because he was moving fast, faster than the therapist really wanted, so she had to keep restraining him and slowing him down. He spent 15 minutes walking on the treadmill.
I kind of wish I had a professional camera rig because sometimes the look on his face was pricelessly cute when she'd tug him back and he'd go, "That's my partner, you can't keep me away from her."
It was especially endearing when he'd try to alert - he'd speed up to try to get to me and would look at her - because she had a beeper on that kept going off. She commented that each time the beeper sounded, she'd have to restrain him and he'd look at her, then at the beeper, then at me, then speed up again.
Finally, in order for him to do his therapy right, she called the people paging her and told them she was turning the pager off until his therapy was over so he'd concentrate on his therapy and not on alerting me.
After that, things went a lot easier.
She kept him on the treadmill as the water drained out so he'd put more weight on his left leg, and he did that very well.
Now he's out of the water treadmill and being dried off.
She's pushing on his right hip to force him to bear more weight on his left leg. I took a lot of pictures of this because I will be doing this with him until his leg is recovered, but this was the best shot of the lot. The look on his face was pretty good, too - "Hey, she's playing with my butt!"
This is the next exercise - she's pushing down on his bottom to flex his legs with weight on them and pointing the the knee to show how much it needs to flex. I took a lot of pictures of this, too, and this is the best picture of the lot.
He was very good, staying with her and not running off. She didn't have to restrain him to keep him in place at all.
Here, he's on the balance board. She did restrain him on that in case he fell off. She wasn't worried about him jumping off. He did well on it, and I just happen to have a balance board at home that I made as a toy for my children. It's about the same size as this one and works just as well.
And here she's doing passive stretches with him. I've already been doing those, so I just keep it up.
This morning, even though he used his leg so well at the therapist's, he was limping with it raised. I followed the therapist's suggestion to keep him on a snug leash and make him sit each time he lifted his leg to limp and praised him when he had four on the floor.
It's a mixed bag - he limps across my desk, but does well when I do the push and stretch exercises.
He goes back next week for his second session.