It's really difficult to say when or even if a dog will ever be "100%", as Dr. Tom Beckett explains in the following two emails to Tick List, but his common sense approach gives you guidelines to follow.  You have to remember that ehrlichiosis, babesiosis, RMSF and Lyme are serious, debilitating diseases.  A dog in recovery may appear to be doing well and eager to get back to everything you once did together, but that doesn't mean that his body is ready for it yet.  When you've been sick, you need time to recover and rebuild your strength and so does he.  Take it slow and take it easy.

                                             ===================================

"The normal healthy body has reserves in circulatory, pulmonary, and intracellular metabolic functioning that are not called into play during ordinary puttering around. Vigorous exercise causes the body to call on these reserves.  Graded regular exercise of a physical conditioning program builds up the level of these reserves and the ability to mobilize them rapidly...that, quite simply, is what 'conditioning' is all about.  During strenuous exercise there is probably some moderate transient activation of the adrenalin and corticoid hormone systems, which arguably is technically 'stress,' but is a good kind of stress. Bad stress comes in when these adrenalin/corticoid systems are activated continuously or 'overtaxed to the max' acutely.

"The difficulty with the recovering TBD patient is that the diseases introduce some large unknowns about how much of these aforementioned reserves the dog's body has intact and how those reserves might be inpaired.

"We know, for example, that Lyme is a 'multisystemic' disease with potential to produce harmful inflammatory changes in muscles, joints, kidneys, CNS, heart, and in small blood vessels and connective tissues generally.  We know that recovery of the various affected tissues/organs from this harm is not instant upon elimination of the Lyme microbe, but takes a period of time and in some tissues/organs the recovery may not ever be  total.

"But there is tremendous variation case to case in Lyme (and other TBD.) With any given dog that has had a serious case of the disease it is highly problematic (meaning partly guesswork) to form estimates of how much damage has been done, and where,  and of how long recovery will take or how complete that recovery will be.  We can't be certain, to put it differently, how much that dog's normal reserves for strenuous exercise have been
impaired or how much time is needed for recovery of those reserves.

"That is the bad news. The good news is that if we take things gradually and use common sense we can work through the uncertainty successfully.  We can't set up in advance a timetable, but if we are attentive the dog will show us the timetable."

                                           ======================================

"When a dog is recovering from a TBD it needs to concentrate its vital forces into the healing/recovery processes and not have those forces diverted by other activities that are stressful. So, its exercise level should be moderated down so it does not exceed the dog's comfort level at that stage.

"Now *comfort level* is different from *tolerance level*. Working to the tolerance level implies working till the dog begins to flag or to limp or to the point that the dog feels *stove up* on the following day. Giving this much exercise is counterproductive because the dog is (a) stressed and (b) will want to lay about and do nothing for the next day or two...when what we want is regular, consistent, moderate exercise. Staying within the comfort level involves stopping at a point where the dog still has a bit of *go* left, and on the following day feels fit and eager to repeat the
exercise activity.

"Determining the comfort level at any given stage entails judgment and a small element of trial and error.  The basic idea is to start small, work up gradually, and if you find you have exceeded the comfort level, cut back in subsequent sessions before again increasing by small increments.

"It is really not possible to generalize about how much exercise, how soon, because there is so much individual variation in severity of illness, age, exercise tolerance, etc.

"Perhaps a rule of thumb would be to figure that after a moderately severe episode the dog needs a couple months of serious healing time with only moderate exercise, and then a gradual conditioning program that works up by increments before anything approaching exhaustive exercise is permitted.

"Also be aware that a dog that experiences a really severe TBD episode may not ever be able to tolerate the extremes of exercise that it formerly handled okay.

"That is all pretty vague, but as I said, it depends.....on the illness and on the dog."

Tom Beckett, DVM
Austin, Texas

 

Return to Index