I brought Sniper to the vet this morning.  They say that most doctors go through a hypochondriac phase while in med school, and I can definitely understand that.  Thanks to vet school, I was thinking about scary things like osteosarcoma and degenerative joint disease all day yesterday. 

Of course, thanks to the plan that all dogs have to make their owners look like idiots, Sniper acted like a brave little soldier and wouldn't show any pain at the vet clinic.  First we checked Sniper's joints, which all had an excellent range of motion.  So we decided to take rads to look at his spine, hips, and stifles.  (Rads is short for radiographs, which are Xrays.  But I've been taught never to utter the word Xray because it is unprofessional for a doctor to say.  Riiight.)  Before we even took the rads, my vet, who understood how worried I was, suggested that I bring them up to school to have an expert look at them.  It was funny because she knew a board certified radiologist would be looking at them and wanted to take the perfect views.  The first set "wasn't good enough" (we use rads that look like that all the time), so we took them again.  These came out beautifully, but the tech had forgotten to put the left/right marker on them.  The vet freaked out for a moment them ran and grabbed a sharpie and drew it on. 

Sniper's intervertebral disc spaces all look clear and evenly sized, and his stifles are beautiful.  As for his hips, there might be a little bit of degenerative change, but it isn't bad and wouldn't cause the clinical signs that he has been showing. 

So we are just going to assume that he had some soft tissue injury.  Sniper is on two weeks rest without walks or anything.  Lots of dogs have to be confined to a crate, but Sniper pretty much imposes strict rest on himself whenever possible. 

So we still don't know what is wrong.  I'm just scared about doing agility in case it makes whatever is wrong worse.  I guess I'll see how he looks in a couple of weeks before deciding anything.  In the meantime I'm going to take his rads to school since I has access to the specialists and let someone who has devoted their whole life to radiology tell me what they think.