On January 3rd of this year, Sammy was hit by a car on the road in front of our house. It

Nurse Molly keeping an eye on Sammy

was our fault for letting him off his leash but I guess we never thought he’d actually run in front of a moving car. We should have known better. Luckily, he only had a dislocated hip and some contusions, and he has made a full recovery. Amazing, considering it was a Suburban that hit him! The vet was also amazed at how well he recovered, and I attribute a lot of it to a few therapies that Steve did for him:  microcurrent therapy and supplements.

It was a difficult for a couple of months even though his injuries were healing. I slept on the floor with Sammy for the first three nights to make he didn’t stop breathing. Apparently when dogs are hit by cars, one of the big concerns is pneumothorax, where their lungs collapse or bleed. After a few days, I got to sleep in my bed, but I was up every two hours to turn him over. His left hip was sore from being dislocated, and his right hip was sore because he landed on it when the car tossed him up in the air and it was very swollen.

Needless to say, Steve and I didn’t get any sleep and after about three weeks I felt almost psychotic. I swear, I don’t know how new parents do it for a year or more! I also had to take Sammy out three or four times a day for a bathroom break, and we had recently had a two-foot snowfall that subsequently turned into two feet of ice. So just taking care of him took all my time, and of course we still had to do our normal lives and work.

One interesting thing that came out of all this is that Sammy bonded with me a bit more. He’s always been a very independent fellow and still is, but once a day he comes over to me and wants to get on my lap. He’s also very nervous around cars, so we figure he probably won’t run after them anymore. We’re not ready to test that theory, though, so he’s a leash dog all the time now. We figure in another year or so we’ll leave him off leash near the house and see how he does.

So here’s my advice for the day: if your dog won’t come when you call, keep him on the leash.