Good News and some Hope for full Recovery!

I took this today in the lobby at our regular vets office.  I call them my regular vet because they are my first choice for regular vet type things.  Well dog exams don’t happen too often at my house because we are constantly in for injuries.   I feel like we use the afterhours vet more often than our “Regular” Vet but since I spend more time with the dogs after regular business hours that makes a lot of sense.    I like this vet though because they seem caring and thorough and are affordable at the same time. 

We went in today for x rays.  The vet we saw last week had recommend views of his shoulders and hips for sure.  Then the elbows and knees if we could.   I went in fairly certain that I wanted to do his shoulders, hips, and at bare minimum the Left Knee since he had the injury on that left side. 

The vet and I chatted and she got me a quote for doing all of the x rays.  It was within the range of what I was able to spend today so I opted to go for more xrays can’t hurt but fewer xrays could!   Unfortunately they did have to sedate him a bit since they thought the shoulder views would be too difficult for them to get with him awake.    He is a bit of a stink and I had expected that getting him to hold still for an xray would be difficult anyway.   Luckily Paul is home sleeping today and agreed to let Dylan hang with him for the day while he was coming out of the anesthesia. 

SO now for good news.   All the xrays were clean for Arthritis.  No signs in his hips, shoulders, knees, or elbows of any arthritis at all.  I am not sure why they could feel the shoulder grinding but that shoulder was inflamed on the thermal imaging we did in April so I think there is probably just some soft tissue injuries up there as well.  Soft tissue can be healed but arthritis can’t so I am happy to be able to confirm there is no Arthritis.

There is a question about one of his knees though.  A fatty pad on the front of the left knee is sticking out or swollen.  That’s still a part of the soft tissue issues though and should be taken care of with the PT we are doing. 

We built him a new PVC Ladder and have been working on it daily.  We are also icing the Left shoulder immediately following exercise and heating his back left left every night.    I have been keeping him on leash when we are out but keeping him from running all together is impossible.  He gets excited just to go into the yard and does a little run around a couple times a day.  Still overall, I think he is being limited to long slow exercise to allow his muscles time to heal!   Hopefully we will start seeing significant improvements sometime soon.    I am just happy that there is no arthritis to worry about!!