Surgery day.

Today was the day for Mae's Femoral Head Excision. I brought Mae to the clinic around 8am and we took some bloodwork to make sure she was healthy enough to undergo anesthetic. Her blood tests turned out fine, besides a bit of platelet clumping from the sample itself, and was deemed well enough for surgery.

She was sedated with a premedication simply known as HAG, a combination of Hydromorphone-Acepromazine-Glycopyrrolate. After about an hour, Mae was super sleepy and it was time to hook her up to her I.V fluids. She pretty much just laid there, pretty oblivious to what was going on (I even had the change to sneak in and clip her nails as short as they would go!) and at about this time, the orthopedic surgeon arrived.

Mae was induced with Diazepam and Propofol, intubated and maintained on a gaseous anesthetic known as Isoflurane. One she was stabalized, the surgeon then gave her an epidural to help alleviate the pain in order to decrease the required anesthetics. Mae didn't respond ideally to the epidural, but after a while of twitching/seizing she eventually gave to and was ready for surgery.

The surgeon ended up having to remove a significant amount of bone from Mae's femur (see above), and it was some not-so-nice looking bone at that. No wonder she was in so much pain, have something like that rubbing up against your pelvis with every movement!

She woke up as ideal as hoped from the anesthetic, she was pretty quiet for the first hour or so and as she came more and more with it, the most we heard out of here was a whine here or a whine there, maybe a bit of movement. I comforted her when she needed it, but for the most part she was perfectly content to just sleep off her drugs.

Around 4pm she was given some canned food which she pretty much inhaled, and then of course wanted more lol. By 5:30pm it was time for me to go home and at this point Mae was kind of with it, but not entirely. She was whining a bit and kind of scrambling, trying to stand every now and then. The last girl is leaving at 8pm tonight so she is going to let me know how Mae is - if need be, I will pick her up and bring her home so I can sit with her all night. We'll see how it goes.

The x-ray on the left is AFTER the surgery, and the x-ray on the right is BEFORE the surgery. What a difference! High hopes for the future. :)

Introduction

This blog is to document my (and Mae's) experience with her mobility issues and ultimately her surgery to correct her hip.

I adopted Mae June 1st 2008, when she was about 1 year old. We went through our ups and downs and as a shelter dog of course she had some issues. She was my buddy though, and she improved alot. I never knew anything was wrong with her health, I thought I was adopting a perfectly healthy, happy young dog.

I always sort of noticed a decrease in her mobility when it came to things like jumping on the couch, climbing in the car, etc. Mae seemed to be unable to physically lift her left hind leg as high as her right. She never had any other obvious signs so I just always attributed it to mild hip dysplasia.

Fast forward to March 2011. Mae was playing with the cat and slipped on the tile floor in my apartment, to which she landed frog-legged with a huge yelp. She seemed pretty sore afterwards and began limping. I monitored her for a week or so before finally taking her to the vet, where they took x-rays, and that is where I got the hugest shock.

Mae's left femoral head had completely degenerated, there was nothing there but boney growth and a ton of scar tissue. Who knew?? Also, there seemed to be an old fracture on her right ischium. We were all shocked and confused, how could she possibly have gone this long without us noticing sooner?

There were a few speculations to the cause; prior femoral head excision, old injury, deformitity from puppyhood? Who knew. Regardless, there were two options - medical management or an expensive surgery.

I'm a poor college student and I also believe surgical intervention should not be the go to choice, so medical management it was. Mae was perscribed a 30kg of Metacam once daily and began to eat a special food called Medi-Cal Mobility formula. She seemed to fair well for quite a while like this, up until recently. So, the week of July 17th-20th, after alot of discussion with pretty much anyone who would listen, Mae's surgery was booked for Wednesday July 27th at 9:30am.