I'm baa-ack!

I haven't even looked to see when I last entered a blog.  Far too long ago, I'm sure.

I'm motivated to start again, because of poor Ursa.  She's had a few incidents of lameness in her front legs in the past, which the vets always put down to soft tissue damage and which usually cleared up in about a week.  Three or four weeks ago though, she stumbled down the stairs and bam, lame in her right leg again. We were about out of Metacam, which is the NSAID they'd usually been giving us, so we made an appointment with the new vet we'd been thinking of trying and went in.

She thought that the Metacam should have taken care of any symptoms and plunked Ursa's elbows under the X-ray machine.  Low and behold, quite clear evidence of arthritic changes.  Sigh. We got more Metacam and an appointment to see the orthopaedic surgeon. I wasn't terribly impressed with that one - you're already doing conservative treatment and it obviously hasn't helped; stem cell therapy is a waste of money; we can do one of these three relatively new surgeries that we don't have long term info on; it needs to be done sooner rather than later, but isn't so urgent that it can't wait until we have the equipment to do them here.

I started reading and posting on the Facebook BRT wall and got in touch with a lovely woman in France who has experience with arthritis in BRTs. The end result is that surgery is going on the back burner for now - she's three years old for goodness sakes! If she has surgery now, what will we do when she's 7 or 8? We've switched her over to a raw diet and she'll be getting whole ground fish as part of that, she gets her second shot of Cartrophen this weekend, she's getting a thrice daily homeopathic arthritis remedy and she's on rest right now... just short walks of 10-20 minutes two or three times daily.  Enough to keep things from stiffening up, but we stop when she starts wanting to take breaks every 10 steps.

You can't see it on the x-ray, but I suspect that she managed to knock off a bone chip that is large enough to be felt when she moves.  (The actual diagnosis is a form of dysplasia called Fragmented Medial Coronoid Process - say that 3 times fast!) Hopefully time and rest and the meds will keep things under control and allow enough of the chip to be absorbed to let her move without the irritation. If we can get her back to a state of only mild limping, I'm hoping to get her into rehab with a place that has a swimming pool and an underwater treadmill.  Many people have told me how their BRTs function quite well with dysplasia and there seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that the sheer bulky musculature of the breed can compensate for a weak joint fairly well.

It's stressing Stuart and I out a bit.  It's hard not to feel somewhat responsible and even harder not to feel like there's surely something else you could be doing to make her more comfortable. She's still gimpy today but seems a bit perkier, so fingers crossed that her elbow is on the mend!