Daphne is doing well today. My husband and I are tired. Daphne is on prednisone to decrease the inflammation in her spinal cord. Prednisone has several side effects; one of the more annoying ones is increased urine production.¹ She may also have some decreased urinary control related to her spinal cord injury. Whatever the reason, she is desperate to urinate every 2-2.5 hours and if we don’t get her outside she will have an accident in her crate. My husband and I take turns getting up with her in the night and I am remembering what it was like to have a baby. Today I also rescheduled one of my client appointments so that I could run home and take her out. (This was unfortunate since I need to make money to pay for her surgery!) Even with this, she has had 3 accidents in her crate in the past 24 hours, so the washer and dryer are running constantly with her bedding. As a side note, this makes it hard to run the dishwasher, which cuts off if we try to run it at the same time as the washing machine or dryer. Still, her proprioception improved from yesterday and she seems to be feeing better, so today is an overall win. She even wants to play with our other dog (which, of course, we can’t allow)!

1. A note about this: prednisone and other steroids cause the body to produce more urine. The patient then needs to drink more water in order to stay hydrated. Restricting water intake does not improve the situation; they will still produce more urine, but now they will also get dehydrated. ↩︎