The Injury

At home, Abbie has a converted Horse corral into a "dog corral". All four of the dogs get daily trips to it for exercise and play time. The corral is about 1 acre big and on a fairly steep hill. The dogs like to run up & down, chasing thrown objects and basketballs.

Abbie is the least active of our dogs. When I say least active, I don't mean inactive. Abbie prefers to lay around and wait for the play time to come to her instead of chasing the others all over the yard.

This particular day, Abbie was about 3/4 of the way down the hill and running back up. Connor was off to her left and running back up faster. Abbie eyed him and made a quick turn towards him mid stride. After catching up to Connor, I had decided play time was over and called all 4 up the hill. About 30 seconds or so had elapsed since I saw Abbie running. When she hit the top of the hill, she was limping pretty bad. Thinking it was another one of our dogs many limps post playing, I helped her inside and waited for it to heal itself.

The injury must have occurred when Abbie turned. Looking back now and after having researched what her injury actually is, I feel confident that is when she injured it. Typically a ruptured Cranial Cruciate Ligament (CCL) is very similar to an ACL injury to people and it happens just like a soccer injury.

After waiting all night without change, we considered taking Abbie into the vet for an evaluation. Still unsure of what it may be, we thought she was limping similar to Shasta when she crushed her foot . We decided against the next day checkup and waited once more.

After two days of manipulation and still no sign of where she's hurt, we decided to take her in. Are we glad we did. Thinking we were bad parents for not getting in sooner, it turned out we got her in much quicker than most. The Doctor on the first visit said she was 95% sure it was the CCL, but needed confirmation from the specialist. The Surgeon we met with two days later laid it all out for us:

TPLO was the surgery we chose. This was a very aggressive surgery, but had the best chance at a full recovery. Dr. Stepnick told us basically, we have a 50/50 chance this happens again to her other leg within a year of surgery. The surgery would consist of shaving the bone down to a flat surface, then screwing a metal plate to the bone to hold the ligament in place. It would be 2 weeks until the first checkup and stitches removed. 4-8 more weeks until she would be able to start rehabbing, and 6 months until she might be back to normal...A long time with 3 other very active dogs.