It's Official

Well after a few weeks of trying to recover from my Cranial Cruciate Ligament Rupture, I'm going to have surgery.  For you humans, this is like a torn ACL you hear about so much in athletes.  I will go in next Monday and be staying with the vet until Wednesday.  I know this will be tough, but I would love to be on all fours again.

I have learned to hop pretty good in the last few weeks and on the grass, I am a master.  As far as the steps go, still not good.  I can get up and down the stairs off the back porch, only four steps and I need a good run at them.  Any more than that and I go down to my belly and slide back; thud, thud, thud.

I like to be with Mike at all times, so when he cleans the rooms I usually lay at the top of the stairs and keep an eye on him.  Now, he blocks off the stairs with dining room chairs, so I lay at the bottom of the stairs until he is done with the rooms.  The worst thing now is I can't show our guests to their rooms, so I make sure I get some good sniffs in before they go up the stairs to their room.

So we went to a vet in Keizer yesterday, about an hour away.  She looked at my x-rays and blood work-ups I had already done.  She took a long look at my knee and made me sit, stand, walk and lay down.  She had several options on what she could do to fix my knee.  We watched some videos on the different choices we had and they chose to do Tibial Tuberosity Advancement, TTA is what everyone calls it and I thought dogs were lazy, humans have a short cut for everything.  Read more about the procedure here.

We also found about another option called TPLO.  This requires the surgeon to go to expensive classes and use expensive tools and the guy who developed it, patented the procedure so they have to pay royalties to perform the operation, what a scam.  The vets who do it, push that procedure because they have so much invested in learning it.

My local vet only does the lateral imbrication technique.  He did not recommend that for me as I am too big and too active.  The vet we talked to yesterday said she would be happy doing this for me and had great success with larger dogs, but Mike and Laura decided that the a bone plate would be better the a mono filament line.

I sure hope I can get through this and get back to my job as meeter and greeter here at The Craftsman B&B.  I hope to be able to go on walks again as I miss all the smells of Pacific City and the cookies I get at the bank and hardware store.  So wish me luck and think about me next Monday.  You can come visit me too, I like visitors and all the new smells you bring with you.