Not too long ago we had noticed a mass on Moon’s right front toe. We took her to the vet, who decided the mass had to be removed, and a skin graft done where the mass was. We’ve known our vet for a long time, and she’s done a lot of various surgeries, but while she hadn’t done a skin graft before, we encouraged her to do it. She did a lot of research, talked to a couple of her instructors in school, mapped it all out, and the day was set.

We dropped her off, and they removed the mass, took a strip of skin out of her side, and applied the graft. Her paw was splinted to keep her from moving it, since movement could cause the very fine capillaries that would form and supply blood to the graft to break. Things looked pretty good for a couple days, when the graft suddenly started turning dark, and sloughed off. Even though she was splinted, she could still flex her toe enough to shear the capillaries.

We took her back, and Tonia redid the graft, using a strip of skin from the her other side. This time, her paw was bound up differently (see picture), in the hope she couldn’t move it. We left her bound up like this for a week or so, plenty of time for graft to get thoroughly grown in. We removed the bandages and found… it had failed. Seems there was still sufficient movement to break the capillaries. Tonia also noticed she had put the graft on 180 degrees out, so if it had taken, the hair on that toe would grow the wrong direction. Oh well, what are you going to do?

Ultimately, we let the toe heal through second intention. Now she has a nice patch of pink skin with no fur on it, looking like this, but without the bit of scab.

A biopsy that was done on the mass turned out to be benign. Goldens are known to be tumor factories, so naturally we were quite pleased with those test results.

I became really proficient at changing her bandages, and slapping on a Ziplock baggy to keep it dry. I have no idea how many 2″ x 2″ sterile gauze pads, rolls of vet tape and 3M adhesive bandage tape I went through in this process.

Here’s a whole series of pictures taken just about every time I changed the bandage: [1] (these gross some people out, but you do what you gotta do for your dog).

We’ve had Moon since 2004/01/20. At the time, Cindy was working in the grooming department at Petsmart. It was one of the Saturdays she had to work, and also a dog adoption day. This guy comes in and says he has a stray, and would they take her? Cindy tells him that Petsmart doesn’t take dogs, and while the dog adoption service might, it was going to be hard, and oh by the way, what kind of dog is it? The guy tells her that it’s a 6 month old Golden Retriever puppy.

At this time, we had only Anvil, my German Shepherd Dog. We had talked about getting another dog, and Cindy really wanted a Golden. So she says “Well, I know someone who might be interested, can you bring her in?”. The guy says “Oh, she’s in the car, let me get her.” The guy brings the dog in, and Cindy decides that the Universe has sent her a Sign, and that Sign is this dog. She tells the guy to hang on a moment, let her make a phone call.

She calls me and relates the story, and I tell her if it’s the dog she really wants, then go ahead. About the only detail that’s wrong is there’s no way this dog is 6 months old, it’s more like 3-4 years. That’s fine with us, but some people apparently have NO idea how to judge a dogs age. There’s this whole back story from the guy about how the dog was roaming the neighborhood, no one wanted her, winter was coming on, yada yada yada.

So for a dog that was roaming, she’s remarkably well trained. She sits, kinda stays, is very polite, doesn’t jump, etc. She has two minor flaws, one of which is that she doesn’t know how to play (which disappointed Anvil greatly), and the other is that off-leash, she tends to decide to take her self for walks. A couple times this meant driving around trying to find her, so whereas at the time I could trust Anvil off-leash, Moon became strictly an on-leash dog. This is only an issue because we live on a two-lane street with a 55 MPH speed limit.

Our guess is that she may have belonged to some older people, and was never allowed to play, or just never learned. She won’t chase a ball, play tug or frisbee, and when another dog tries to get her to play, she seems to take it as aggression, and cuts loose on them. She’s fine with other dogs, and with her disposition, would make a great therapy dog.

So far, Moon has had a pretty good life with us. We did find she had heartworms when we got her, but she’s free of them now. After a few months of treatment, you could really see a difference when she walks up a hill. Whereas before she would slow down and be panting somewhat, now she just keeps going. Other than the skin grafts mentioned later, she’s had no major medical events.