Pre-Surgical Appointment

Today we met with the vet at Kindest Cut who will be amputating Murph's withered leg (I call it his flipper).  He did great at the vet and made about a million new friends among the other patients and the staff at the clinic.  He is healthy and everything is good to go for the amputation, which has been scheduled for 2/1.  Then we went for a nice long romp at the dog park where he made about a million more new friends.  Murph is one popular boy!

I've had a lot of people ask me why we are amputating his leg and/or if we have to do it.  There are several reasons as to why we ultimately decided to do it, including:

• The flipper really messes with his balance, and amputation should make that much better.
• He gets really frustrated because he wants to use the leg - he'll shake it and shake it and shake it to try to get it to do what he wants.  
• Because the top part of the leg works, he thinks he has support when he doesn't.  The best example of this is that he will jump off of something and put his legs out to catch himself, but the one isn't actually there even though it feels like it is working, so he face-plants when he lands.  
• He is developing a callous where the foot bends at a 90-degree angle (see picture below), but it isn't a nice and protective callous.  It's the kind of "callous" that is going to break open and get infected a lot.

There are a few other reasons, but those are the biggies. The surgery itself is pretty straight-forward and recovery is usually very fast.  Then he can start learning how to walk and run and play without that darn flipper throwing him off balance all the time!