A death defying feat

When we moved to Madras, we moved into govt. housing, which was a fairly decent sized apartment. While it was no big deal for us, Lyka found the whole concept of an apartment puzzling - there was no access to anything resembling a garden, no place to stretch out and soak in the sun, nothing. And to top it all off, we would disappear for long periods in the day for school and work, leaving her locked inside. Let's just say, she was not happy about this arrangement and took a while to come to terms with it.

Moving into a cramped space also meant that we now had to take a decision on whether or not we wanted Lyka to breed. While I loved the idea of lab puppies running amok in the house and then putting them for sale, my parents decided it wasn't practical. One, we didn't have the space and two, being the softies we are, there would have been no way in which we would have had the heart to put little furry golden colored animals on sale. That being said, we decided it was best to get Lyka spayed. So off we went to Blue Cross and picked up Lyka a couple of days later, post the procedure.

Initially Lyka seemed none the worse for the wear. She had stitches that took time to heal but that was all. Then we started noticing that Lyka's beautifully triangular face no longer seemed normal - her facial muscles were seizing up and her eyes looked unfocused. Soon she started to bump into things and started having seizures. Our vet said that when dogs are usually operated on, they're not given a tetanus shot because they have a very high threshold for infection. However, Lyka seemed to have gotten tetanus nonetheless, usually a death toll for any animal. But we wouldn't give up.

We took Lyka to the vet hospital everyday where she would be injected with various things and put on IVs. Then we'd bring her back every evening and sit with her, coaxing her to eat through a dropper and hold her tight when she'd have seizures so she wouldn't hurt herself. Things seemed bleak for a while and the infection took the better part of a month to pass, but I don't think there was any point at which we didn't believe that she would make a full recovery. There was no question of Lyka not being around.

Finally, after extensive visits to the vet, she started to improve. Her doc was very surprised and apparently wrote a medical article chronicling her whole sickness. We were told Lyka was one of maybe 10 dogs in the country who had survived tetanus. Eventually, her facial muscles relaxed and she looked like the happy dog she was and she stopped bumping into things. We like to think that apart from the extensive medication she was on, our positive vibes had a lot to do with her recovery.