You would think by now we would have had enough with surgeries for Zane. Unfortunately, his body said otherwise. In February, he suffered a partial tear of the ccl in his right knee. Right on schedule, since about half of the dogs with ccl ruptures will tear the other ccl within a year. Rather than wait for the tear to get worse and start causing Zane more pain, we opted to go ahead with surgery quickly and try to head off any additional problems. Seemed like a good enough plan.
Zane had another TTA surgery on February 12th. The surgery went well and he was able to come home again on the same day. He took all his pills on schedule and easily resigned himself to being leashed for potty time out back. He had a much easier time getting around than last year and didn't seem to have as much pain. He was recovering well aside from a lot of seepage from his incision. We kept that in check as best we could by applying pressure bandages.
Ten days later, disaster struck. I noticed Zane toe touching more than usual with his right leg and not putting much weight on it. By the following morning, he was having a really hard time walking. I took him out back to potty and he stopped walking. I couldn't get him to move. After about 5 minutes I bribed him with a ride in the van. He limped off to the van and we headed to the ER for xrays.
More bad news for Zane as something went wrong and he had a tibial crest failure. On the xrays, it looked like a broken leg to me. His surgeon took the weekend to figure out how he would like to repair the broken Zane and order a bone block for grafting. By Tuesday the cadaver bone was in and I drove Zane back out for another surgery. This time he spent the night. He came home wearing a huge "Carolina Blue" cast to further protect his leg.
Ten days later, stitches were removed and we tried going cast- less. A few days later and I was in with a local surgeon to wrap Zane in another cast for stability. This one we did in bright green since St Patrick's Day was quickly approaching. That lasted about a week. In general, he continued to do well even though he was much more cautious about using the leg.
Another week or so later and Zane was suddenly coming up lame... again. Through the course of a day, his knee cap developed some twin peaks. Off to the ER for more xrays. The pins that were used in his revision surgery were backing out. So the following day we scheduled surgery with a doctor we didn't know to go in and get the pins out before they broke through the skin. Another new incision and more healing to follow. Oh, and another $1000 bill.
Certainly not the way we envisioned this knee repair to go. We thought this one would be so much easier since we were just dealing with a partial tear.
