Canine Iliopsoas Injuries Symptoms: Sometimes You Don’t Even Know What You’re Looking At—Cookie’s Hind Legs Transiently Fail To Work

Canine iliopsoas injuries symptoms can be anything from subtle signs that you can easily miss to profound lameness. These injuries often go undiagnosed in dogs.

Things you might notice in your dog include

• difficulty or stiffness when getting up
• reluctance to jump
• gait changes/ outward rotation of the affected leg
• stance changes
• intermittent lameness
• not lifting a leg to pee in male dogs

Here is what the symptoms of her iliopsoas injury looked like in Cookie–scariest stuff ever.

They say that what people fear the most is the unknown. It might be because when facing the unknown, you simply picture the scariest thing imaginable. After all, that’s all you have to go on. How scary that ends up depends on your past experiences and your imagination.

When I watch movies with people getting all upset about their amnesia, I always wonder if that would be such a bad thing after all. Forgetting one’s past is like a brand new start. Dropping all your baggage. I could go for that.

My imagination is pretty good and I have experienced plenty of scary things.

The initial event

The day started like any other. The guys got two good walks under their belts. It was in the afternoon, about an hour and a half after the last walk.

I was working and Cookie was resting with hubby in the living area.

I heard Cookie getting up. But it sounded like a struggle. I leaped up and rushed over to see what was happening.

It looked as if Cookie was trying to get up but couldn’t.

She has her front legs under a footstool so I yanked it out of the way. But it didn’t help. Cookie kept struggling. I tried to prop her up by her harness but she still couldn’t get her bearing.

Cookie looked petrified and as if one or more of her legs were paralyzed.

We moved her to a dog bed, trying to figure out what we were seeing and attempting to relax her. She stood there, scared, shaking, not moving, though her legs were holding her up.

Then she slowly sat and eventually we convinced her to lay down. I was shaking too, ready to get on the phone with the on-call vet as soon as we got her stabilized.

Did Cookie hurt her back somehow?

She looked fine all day, even after the walk. Because Jasmine had her neck problems randomly pop up out of the blue, I thought it possible that something could have happened with Cookie’s spine.

I was trying to figure out how we were going to get her to the emergency safely, without causing further damage.

It felt as this was happening for hours but must have lasted just seconds.

As I was trying to catch my breath on my way to make the call, I heard cheerful “good girl!”

This wasn’t hubby trying to calm her down, this was happy praise. I turned around and there she was, walking over to collect the treat hubby offered. She looked better to him so he asked her if she wanted a treat. Cookie did and got right up to get it.

And just like that, the ordeal was over.

Cookie moved and looked perfectly normal.

I gave her a bunch of treats which she ate. Her tail was wagging, she licked my face. Then she initiated play with her housemate, JD. Grabbed a toy and came to play with me.

There was nothing wrong any longer as far as we could see. What on green Earth happened?

It didn’t seem to make sense to call the emergency vet any more unless something changed. Still freaked out, I could barely hold the treats I was giving her in my shaking fingers.

Was it a seizure?

I still needed to talk to a vet. Thankfully, Dr. Krista of www.pawbly.com was online and willing to talk to me about what happened and what we should do.

She brought up the idea that it could have been a seizure of sorts.

She figured that at this point we should keep a keen eye on Cookie. That sometimes such things might happen once and never to repeat.

It didn’t look like a seizure to me but then I only witnessed grand mal seizures with Roxy, where her whole body was in spasm, she was foaming and unresponsive. When I looked up partial seizures online, I only saw videos of dogs mostly having their faces or heads twitch.

This was nothing like that. But who knows.

Did Cookie’s leg just “fell asleep?”

My darling hubby wanted me to ask Dr. Krista whether it was possible that Cookie’s foot or leg simply fell asleep. Hubby always tries to sell the idea of a leg having fallen asleep; even when Jasmine busted her knee ligaments. But I was willing to buy it. Dr. Krista confirmed that it was indeed possible. And perhaps the fear of not understanding what was happening to her did the rest?

Or maybe Cookie’s front legs were trapped under that footstool and it freaked out so badly …?

The fact is, we didn’t have the foggiest idea what actually happened.

The day before, while running around the trailer in the pursuit of a mouse, she did favor her front left leg for a little while. We checked it and didn’t find anything. We figured she stepped on one of the picky weeds. That happened before.

No answers

Of course, remembering Jasmine’s mysterious front leg lameness which she got a few times and which, as we figured at the end, must have been from the neck issues, got my brain churning about that too. Were those two events related? Or was it just two separate events which had nothing to do with each other?

Again, we didn’t know.

We had Cookie checked out by a chiropractor and she didn’t find any major issues with Cookie’s spine. As well as Cookie’s known problems are in the lower back, not the neck. She’s been perfectly mobile since; running, jumping, playing, walking as always.

Talking to Cookie’s vet

Of course, we reported this to our vet. Cookie’s vet doesn’t think it was a seizure because there was no rigidity and no loss of conscious awareness as far as we could tell. Those were signs I thought were missing too.

She agreed that a heavy sleep or sleeping position that caused an abnormal feeling in Cookies leg could have done it. Or sudden muscular back pain, or an episode of low blood pressure.

Lots of theories, no answers

We were keeping an eye out of anything unusual. Cookie has been a bit anxious the following couple of days but that could have been from the weird weather we were having. Maybe. We hoped that whatever it was, it was a one time deal.

Dr. Krista also mentioned that something like this happened to her dog after Frontline application. But we don’t use such things. She also suggested that it could have been from a bug bite or a tick bite. We didn’t find any ticks (we check every day) or any other discernible bites. But that too was a theory I would be happy to subscribe to.

In summary, we had no idea what happened and there were no further visible problems to observe.

The next event

Time has passed and everything looked great. I haven’t forgotten about it but I hoped that it was some kind of a freak event that will never happen again.

For a long time, however irrationally, I was scared every time Cookie laid at that spot. However, the next time things went wrong was outside on a walk, in the bush.

Cookie was running through the bush, chasing after squirrels, as usually. We let her run around in there for a while and then called her.

Cookie came running to us but …

… she was running lop-sided, leaning to one side and her left hind leg was tucked in towards the other and not really working right. She ran all the way up to us and sat down.

This was not a limp.

At least not a limp I’ve ever seen before and I’ve seen plenty. What happened? We started examining Cookie. Meanwhile, she heard another squirrel and dashed off after it. The gait still looked wrong but, clearly, she no longer cared. We did.

I went after her, fetched her, put her on the leash and we slowly and carefully started making out way home.

By then, though, she seemed to be working normally. What the heck was that about?

We came home without any further incidents and I immediately made an appointment both with her primary vet and her chiropractor for the next day.

And, just like that, it was all over yet again.

We watched Cookie like hawks but nothing seemed amiss.

The next morning, her primary vet examined her head to toe. Cookie got a physical exam, neuro exam and TCVM exam. Nothing appeared out of place except pain response at her sacroiliac joint. We knew Cookie had issues in that area; this made sense. The vet said that a chiropractic adjustment would be a good idea–we already had another appointment for later that day.

The chiropractor confirmed that the pelvic area indeed had issues and that this could have been behind the event.

This time, the problem returned fast.

Cookie got adjusted and seemed as good as new. Except that a few weeks later it happened all over again, pretty much exactly the same way.

Before we got to the bush, Cookie dashed toward a puddle. I was monitoring her gait–Cookie wasn’t running right. She was kicking her right hind leg out to the side. I mentioned that I felt Cookie needed another adjustment. Because Cookie seemed fine enough otherwise, we proceeded with the walk.

We got to the bush and Cookie dashed off after her squirrels. As always, we let her run around for a while before we called her.

And just like the before, Cookie came running up to us, all wrong. This time it looked like both hind legs weren’t working properly, lagging in response and not really baring the weight the way they should.

It really looked to me like some kind of partial paralysis thing.

We got Cookie to stop and sit. She sat down with one leg kicked out to the side and one kind of folded under. I wasn’t liking the looks of that at all but at least hoping that it would be short-lived like last time.

She seemed perfectly fine otherwise, not upset and not distressed. We leashed her and started carefully making our way home. Her gait was once again sorting itself out quickly.

In a short while, she was willing to go on chasing mice as if nothing happened. But as she made a leap into the grass, the weird weakness of the legs returned.

I gave the leash the hubby because while with me it’s always all fun and games. In contrast, being on a lead with daddy is serious business and he was going to be more successful to keep her subdued so we could get home without putting any further undue strain on the legs, back, or what the source of the problem was.

Was this going to keep happening now?

Was it that a nerve gets pinched somewhere, messing with communication between the brain and the hind legs? Is it possible that one day the nerve gets damaged for good? My heart was in my throat.

We made appointments with both her vet and her chiropractor again but this time I was REALLY worried about the little girly.

Did anything like that ever happen to your dog? Did your vet diagnose it?

The journey to a diagnosis was long and bumpy. Eventually, Cookie was diagnosed with iliopsoas injury.

Related articles:
Canine Iliopsoas Injury: A Common Undiagnosed Injury in Dogs

Further reading:
Canine Iliopsoas Muscle Tears: Clinical Signs, Diagnosis, and Treatment
The Iliopsoas Muscle: The Troublemaker