Old Guys Shouldn't Play With Teenagers

I haven't blogged much lately about my dogs, since we were plugging away with everything status quo. Avalanche continues to make amazing improvement and he went back and saw his surgeon 1 1/2 years after the last post-op follow up and he is truly amazed at how well he is doing.

On another note, as per my title to this blog, my old doberman, Deon (he is 9) was busy playing rough with his baby sister Diva (she is 21 months) in the backyard while I was getting Avalanche's shoes on for our normal morning walk. But this morning was not normal. All of a sudden I heared screaming like I have never heard before. I ran to the backyard and Deon was on the ground and Diva was standing over him barking - like come on let's keep playing. When I moved her so he could get up, it was horrid! His left leg, just hung there. We had no idea what had happened - but he was in a lot of pain. After thinking about where to take him (it was a Sunday morning), we thought about our local emergency hospital for pets in Mission Viejo, but knew that if they couldn't deal with it, we would have to take him some place else Monday morning. So we decided to take him to All Care Animal Referral Center, the same place Avalanche was referred for his spinal cord injury.

Well, my old guy had severely broken his femur - the largest bone in the body! The break was a bad one (as the vet said it was like he was hit by a car). They thought that maybe he had bone cancer, since how could this huge bone break by a fall in the backyard. He was scheduled for surgery for the next morning and they had a bunch of tests to run. They found out that he is in the early stages of renal failure, which created some complications with the surgery - but it went off without a hitch. He had some new state-of-the-art prosthetic device put in his leg to stabilize the bone which only required one hole to be drilled into the bone and no wire! Five days in critical care were up and down trying to stabilize him medically, but he came home to us prior to Christmas. His 40 staples were taken out after his first post-op visit and he was such a good boy, we didn't need to bother with the e-collar, he left his incision alone.

He is on the road to recovery, but now much go on separate walks from his brother and sister since he needs to move slow. We have him on a special diet for kidney disease (this is another blog about the horrors of K/D Hill's Prescription Diet Dog Food) and he is doing GREAT! On his last checkup, the doctor could not believe how great his bone was healing for an old guy with kidney failure, he will show them that he might be down but not done yet! We sure love this guy and he is eating up the attention. The biggest problem is now he can't hold his bladder all night so we are doing 3:00 AM potty calls which is killing us - but we have our boy home and he is so sweet!