Sutures, dressing and bruising

Here is a post-op photo of the sutures, dressing and bruising taken on the road back to SF from the surgery in Missouri about a day and a half after the procedure.

She had more bruising than is typical in TR cases.  Our follow-up doctor suggested, in not so doctorly terms, that our girl is just "a bleeder".  This could very well be the case - we've never had any other experiences with which to benchmark for her.

Post-op Day 21 (3 weeks)

Here's a video of Miley at 3 weeks post op showing her gait while walking around the block.

Post-op Day 4 - finally showing off her gait

On day 4, our first full day home back in SF, Miley shows off her post-op gate for the first time.  This appears in the final video in this post.

Post-op Day 3 - morning

Our girl is doing some stretching and perking up in spirit.  She's using both legs on her own to walk, but compensates while sitting.  To sit, she takes all the weight off her tightrope leg, leaving out in front and to the side.  She's getting around her cone to lick her sutures, so we ended up getting her a longer cone. 

We also arrived home in SF this day, and include some video of her appetite - the one personality trait truly unaffected by her orthopaedic ordeal!

Post-op Day 2 with video - our girl is a nightowl.

Here are three more videos from Day 2.  The first one shows some continued reluctance in using her tightrope leg while the other videos show her shedding that resistance and using the leg voluntarily by evening time (after a long nap on the road).  You can see improvement, but that she is bearing the majority of her weight on her non-tightrope hind leg (on her left rear leg).

Post-op Day 2 with video - our girl is not a morning dog

Here are a few videos of post-op day 2 morning.  After picking her up the morning after the surgery, we started our drive back to SF and stopped in Breckenridge, CO for the night.  These videos show Miley the next morning - groggy, out of it (likely an effect of the Ace, the sedative we had her on to avoid hyperactivity in the acute phase of the post-op).  We requested that Miley be given a sedative after the surgery because Miley is a very high energy animal and when she gets a mind to it she can act like an acrobat.  We didn't want her causing herself harm after the surgery during the critical phase of the activity restriction/recovery.  Miley was administered the sedative on and off as needed whenever it seemed like she was getting too antsy for the first 3 days post op.  We discontinued use all together on day 3 once we arrived home and she had her own recovery-safe place to rest instead of toughing it out in the back of our vehicle on the drive. She had a sleepless night (and so did we).  These videos show her sutures, her temperament after surgery, and how reluctant she is to walk (dragging her tightrope leg on the ground without towel assist).  Her tightrope leg was enormous compared to the non-tightrope leg.  We used a heat pack on the way to Breckenridge as instructed by our surgeon.  In the morning, we did notice improvement.  The most important thing to monitor was continous day-to-day improvement, no worsening.

Post-op Day 1

Miley is reluctant to use her tightrope leg while walking.  She toe-touches with towel assist (a towel cradled under her pelvic region and used like a harness to relieve the weight bearing in her back end while she walks - good for stairs in arthritic dogs also).  When we drop the towel, she avoids use of the tightrope leg and instead prefers to hop on her other hind leg (which also underwent arthroscopic surgery to remove damaged stifle structures that were causing pain and degeneration).

Surgical video clips - Bilateral arthroscopy videos 11-12

Here is a sampling of the arthroscopy video clips we were sent home with.

Surgical images - Bilateral arthroscopy, Dr. James Cook, University of Missouri

Below are the images from the bilateral arthroscopy we were sent home with.  Unfortunately, they aren't labeled.  What can you learn from these?  The short hand of it is that red indicates degeneration and that the white clean structures indicates a clean joint (before vs. after).