[BowWowMeow]

I am glad you have a diagnosis. I hope you have your dog on a high quality, grain free food and joint supplements as well as Ester C. All of this helped my older dogs (who had sports injuries) immensely. With the kind of pain your dog is in you definitely need to be giving him nutritional support, anti-inflammatories and something for the pain. There are also harnesses you can buy to help support him when he walks. And as others have mentioned, you absolutely have to get the extra weight off of him because no matter what option you choose his recovery will be much more difficult with extra weight.

My dog Massie tore her CCL at age 10. My vet diagnosed it manually and then I took her to the UW vet school where they did x-rays and recommended the cheaper of the two surgeries you posted. At that time it was under $1000 (this was many years ago). I do not remember the degree of her tear but she was not limping as badly as your dog is now. It tore when she jumped about 3 inches off of the ground for the frisbee.

She had bilateral HD and had also had a hip replacement which was starting to wear out. She had a very difficult time recovering from the surgery and never really got back to 100% on that knee but she wasn't very strong to begin with because of her hips. In retrospect I don't think she was a great surgical candidate because of her HD. About a year later she got a partial tear in the other knee but I chose to treat that conservatively and it healed well. She died of cancer just short of age 12.

Chama had partial tears in both of her knees and I treated them both conservatively and they healed well but she did have arthritis when she got older. She was on 2 different kinds of joint supplements, Ester C and some herbs and homeopathy for her arthritis and all things considered she got around quite well. She also died of cancer at age 14 plus a few months.

 

[3K9Mom]

Just to answer your question above, we DO do quite a few laparoscopic surgeries on dogs often, and you'd be amazed at the severity of the procedures involved. But a TPLO is a procedure where the surgeon goes in, cuts apart the bone, rotates it, then puts the whole thing back together with plates and screws. Can't do that with scopes. There are human surgeries that surgeons can't do with scopes too.

I just skimmed the other posts, but the dog in the videos needs to lose weight to be a good candidate for TPLO. Yes, it's worth waiting, even if you have to help him walk with a harness for the next several months. My K9 surgeon and I were chatting one day about the cases that have gone bad for him over the years. Most of the time, they're orthopedic cases (knee surgeries and hip replacements) and pretty much, every one has been with a dog that's overweight. Even if you opt not to do surgery, the dog should not have that much weight on that joint.

I'll be blunt: get some weight off that dog asap. My little beagle needed to lose a couple pounds before her recent knee surgery. She wasn't overweight. But she wasn't lean either. I wanted her to be lean. The less weight we put on a recovering joint, the better. It can be the difference between a good surgical outcome and a bad one.

Otherwise, I had a dog that had two TPLOs (the ligaments ruptured within about 30 seconds of each other) years ago. She lived on those rebuilt knees for about 8-9 years, hiking, snowshoeing, wrestling with our other dogs, swimming, etc. I think that while a TPLO won't give our dogs back 100% of what they had before the injury (it can give back about 85-90% of function according to my surgeon), it's a great surgery when the dog is a good candidate, is supervised vigilantly to ensure proper healing (no running, playing, jumping, etc), and is given suitable rehab -- at home and/or with a certified rehab vet. At the least, I recommend one meeting with a rehab vet to get instructions on exercises/stretches to do at home.