Here’s the poor post-op dog. There are so many staples in that leg that it looks like he’s got a zipper — he’s not really putting weight on it yet although he’s toe-touching a lot. He also seems to think that when in motion, it’s important to go everywhere as fast as he can on his three legs — I think he’s trying to outrun the leg that hurts — but it keeps following him around. He’s in pretty good spirits — bored, and occasionally making a run for it, or doing something he shouldn’t like jumping on the couch (he’s allowed on the couch, it’s just the jumping on and off while on the injured list that has me worried).
There are two kinds of canine ACL surgery — we went for the less-invasive one where they drill a hole through his lower leg bones, and string a suture through it, then wrap it around the back of the joint to stabilize it. There’s another more radical surgery where they actually cut off the lower leg bones, change the angle of the knee joint, and bolt it all back together — but that seemed a little severe, and since he’s not a big dog, we went for the less-invasive option. The good news was that the ligament hadn’t been entirely blown, so the recovery should be easier that it would be otherwise.
Right now he’s in his crate in my office, a crate he likes much better today than yesterday, because I folded up a big poofy old comforter and so now it’s very cozy in there. There’s a lot of sleeping going on around the casa, and his incision is looking better every day. Poor bunny. Here’s hoping he’ll be able to run and chase things through the woods again this summer like his old self.
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Oh, poor guy… he’s even doing the pouty face in the picture! I’ve heard that the canine ACL surgery usually has very good results, so I guess it’ll all be worth it. It’s just no fun to see your dog in pain when they don’t understand why.
He’s a real pro at the pouty face — but he’s doing pretty well considering — and the incision is starting to look like it’s healing up — for a couple of days there it was really icky and red and puffy –
[...] It’s been quite a weekend here at LivingSmall. First, the gimpy dog has not recovered very well — turns out that his achilles tendon is falling apart, and his “good” leg isn’t really good enough to support his weight — it’s full of arthritis in the hock. So I think he’s having more surgery on Thursday to repair the achilles tendon, and then we’re going to have to order him some braces to support the poor arthritic hocks. With any luck, this will at least get him back on his feet and allow him to get around the yard and maybe go for short walks to the dog park etc. I’m sort of torn about all this — I’m not convinced that doing this much surgery on a dog is entirely fair to the poor little guy. He doesn’t understand why we keep hurting him, and I worry that there isn’t enough good leg to effect a proper recovery of the bad one, but there isn’t a lot of choice at this point. He can’t walk without a splint, and that tendon isn’t going to heal itself, so I guess we’ll give it a try. (Thank goodness I’m getting money back from Uncle Sam this year — I know there’s a war we should be paying for, but my contribution to gettting the economy going again is in the form of veterinary bills). But in the meantime — he chewed his foot out of the splint, and it promptly swelled up to at least twice it’s normal size, so the last 24 hours have been consumed with re-wrapping the splinted leg, then cutting him out of it when he starts mysteriously crying and chewing at it at midnight. It’s very loosely wrapped this morning as we wait for the vet’s office to open and he’s making little harrumphing sounds in the basket underneath the table so I don’t forget that he is not a happy camper. [...]
[...] Yesterday I took poor Gimpy Dog over to Billings to the veterinary orthopedist. Even typing that makes me feel slightly ashamed of myself — we live in a nation in which an enormous percentage of our population doesn’t even have human health care, and I’m spending how much money on orthopedic surgery for my dog? So anyhow, I was really hesitant about this whole thing — not just because of the money, but because the effect of the first surgery, which was supposed to increase his mobility had exactly the opposite effect — he fell apart entirely. But this guy is a specialist, and does a lot of orthopedic work on animals, and I figured he could give me a reasoned idea about what we were facing. [...]