Bella's Recovery Continues

Just a very short update on Bella’s situation.

After several weeks of twice daily comfrey poultice applications and administering colloidal/ionic silver she has been making a slow, but steady recovery.

One of the key indicators of improvement in this case is the length of time Bella spends either cushed or standing. Excluding the hours of darkness, she has reduced the time spent in one position to about 3 hours, indicating that the process of getting up and down is more bearable now. This is a vast improvement over the 48 hours she had spent either flat out or standing up. For the past six days she has also been receiving homeopathic Lachesis, which brought on a day of fever within the knee and the opening of the worst abscess of all on the front of the knee. The heat has gone, the lumpy swellings have diminished considerably and there are only two large suppurating abscesses remaining.

The pain level seems to have increased and Bella holds her knee hard against her flank at times. However, her mobility has also increased and she frequently uses the bad leg to scratch at her fore legs. The thigh muscle has also re-developed and appears less wasted than even a week ago.

Our main concerns now are completing the abscess draining before the cold winter sets in, reducing the hard swelling that surrounds the entire knee and getting Bella to transfer more weight onto the bad leg.

She appears to be having some trouble with standing up these days though. The advice we were given implied that if Bella didn’t start sharing the weight on her bad leg that she could end up with a breakdown of her other hind leg. A llama’s center of gravity is just behind the fore legs and very little weight is actually carried by the back legs. The problem as far as Bella is concerned is not that she cannot get her back end off the ground, but that she has to use a more dynamic thrusting motion with her front legs. She often ends up with her back end up, but still resting on her front ‘elbows’.

With the onset of frosty nights, we are only applying the comfrey poultice during the daytime. The effect that the poultice has is even more noticeable now, as the abscesses scab over during the night, sealing in the gunge that needs to come out. The poultice softens the scabs and the abscesses pour forth their excrescence.

The body doesn’t necessarily take the shortest or most direct route to healing, but we are confident that with the right stimuli, it takes the most appropriate route….if we allow it.