Help me, for I have fallen and I can't get up.

I have probably mentioned in the past that my partner and I have a small sausage dog, formally known as Jack, informally known as 'weasel'.

Jack has us both wrapped around his paw and also works his magic on all visitors to our place (unless you're tall, in which case 'little man syndrome' kicks in and he woofs his head off at you for the first half hour). He even wins over 'non-dog-people', which, until they met, included my partner who swore that I would be getting a dog over his dead body. (Current score: 1 Mad Hatter, 0 the dead body of dog-loving partner).

Anyway, Jack, being designed like a sausage on small runty legs, comes from a long line of silly little dogs that are prone to back problems. We are painfully aware of this but it doesn't stop him from roaring around the house like a looney and leaping on to couches, beds etc at full speed.

He was bounding up the stairs on Sunday night when we heard a serious yelp, resulting in one rather sore looking sausie dog who was still mooching around but a little more tenderly than usual. We did the professional pseudo-vet 'poke bits of dog and see if he yells' technique but couldn't find anything wrong (or any bits that resulting in yelling) so we headed out for the night leaving him to chill out in the house.

Coming back, we decided to take him for a walk, only to have him boycott it by sitting down in the middle of the pavement and refusing to go any further about 100 metres down the road. Anyone who has owned or walked a dog knows that this is not typical dawg behaviour so we took him home and set about fussing over him.

In the time we had been out it looked like his pulled doggy muscle had seized up a bit cos' he wasn't doing stairs well at all. So, in true overly-soppy owner fashion, we decided to carry him upstairs and make a bed for him by our bed for the night (not that we can do anything to help him if he has problems in the night, or that it is any more suitable than his perfectly adequate dawg basket in the laundry downstairs.

Not content with bringing his basket upstairs and putting it by the bed we decided to instead create a little uber-snuggly-bed out of my partner's mum's handmade quilt (which we would hang for if she found out about!) and a towel for a blanket. Jack-the-now-milking-it dachshund thought this was most adequate thank you very much and snuggled up and went to sleep, not before sitting up looking perfectly alright when a liver piece was offered his way.

We began to suspect that he might be healing up rather faster than he was letting on but went to bed and left him to it. At 4am when the supposedly invalided dachshund came flying from a standing start onto our bed and under the covers (as dachshunds are wont to do), we thought that perhaps he might be on the mend....possibly.

Are we pushovers or what?!