I never expected to become the person friends called when their dog couldn’t walk.

I became that person because of Heidi — my dachshund, and the reason DisabledDogCare exists.

Heidi was around six years old when her back went. One morning she was fine. By the afternoon she was dragging her back legs and looking at me like I was supposed to know what to do. I didn’t. I made every mistake a first-time IVDD owner can make in the first 48 hours, and I made most of them while frantically Googling from a vet waiting room.

She had surgery. She never regained feeling in her back end.

What I learned in the months after — how to manage a paralyzed dog, how to prevent pressure sores, how to fit a wheelchair, how to keep a dachshund who can’t feel her feet from destroying her feet, how to grieve the dog you thought you had while showing up for the dog you actually have — none of it was in one place. It was scattered across forums, half-remembered vet conversations, product reviews written by people who’d clearly never used the product on a dog who couldn’t feel it, and the occasional research paper I had no business trying to read at 2 a.m.

Why this site exists

DisabledDogCare is the resource I needed and couldn’t find.

Most of what I write about is IVDD — because that’s what I lived through with Heidi, and because the information gap for new IVDD owners is the one I feel most personally. I also write about degenerative myelopathy (DM), because DM families face a lot of the same practical questions about mobility, quality of life, and how to keep a dog with a failing spinal cord comfortable and dignified. The two conditions are medically different, but the day-to-day caregiving overlaps more than most people realize.

I’m not a vet. I don’t play one on the internet. When I cite a study, I link it. When I recommend a product, I’ve either used it on Heidi or I say plainly that I haven’t. When something is a judgment call — and a lot of IVDD and DM caregiving is a judgment call — I try to lay out the trade-offs rather than pretend there’s a clean answer.

What I write about

  • IVDD: from the first emergency signs through post-op recovery, crate rest, and long-term life with a paralyzed or partially paralyzed dog
  • Degenerative myelopathy: what to expect, how to adapt the home, how to think about quality of life as mobility declines
  • Mobility gear: wheelchairs, harnesses, slings, drag bags, ramps — what actually works and what looks good in product photos
  • The hard conversations: cost of surgery, when insurance helps and when it doesn’t, quality-of-life decisions, end-of-life care

Editorial approach

DisabledDogCare doesn’t run paid product placements. I use Amazon affiliate links on some product recommendations, and buying through those links helps keep the site running, but no brand pays for coverage and no product gets a better review because of an affiliate program. I don’t publish “best of” roundups or rankings, because I don’t think that’s honest given how much the right piece of gear depends on the specific dog.

If you want to talk to other families going through this, the community forum is at community.disableddogcare.com. It’s small and it’s real and it’s the closest thing to the resource I wished I’d had when Heidi first went down.

Heidi taught me that a dog who can’t walk is still very much a dog. This site is my attempt to pay that forward.