Ten year old Labrador tears ACL (TPLO Repair)- The injury

Second week post TPLO Surgery

Ahhhhh…. finally our first warm sunny day in Maine, third week of June, on a Sunday… perfect. No kids until 5pm that day so Melissa and I had our lazy morning followed by yard work that was more yard therapy. “Hey Babe, let’s take the labs swimming.” I said to Melissa as Bailey and Juno panted in the shade, recovering from morning long games of fetch and puppy ear tugging.

Bailey, our 10 year old black Labrador Retriever, was acting more and more like a grandpa to our new addition Juno, a 5 month old female yellow Labrador Retriever. He wasn’t quiet fast enough to out run the vigorous pup for the squeaky tennis ball. After a half-dozen tosses he would typically come up a little gimpy and retire to asserting an alpha male perimeter of piss and kicks before baling up at our feet on the deck. Getting down to the Saco River for the first swim of the year would do us all some good.

This was Juno’s first swim and we were excited to see how she would do. Bailey loves the water. Despite his age and 94 lbs of too many leftovers he would typically swim himself into exhaustion taking a couple of days of stiff recovery time. Bailey made the leap into the back of the Sequoia, no easy task for Juno who had to be carried in. We pulled in to see the lot with a couple of SUVs branding varying dog breed euro-stickers in the rear window; the river was low, slow and warm, perfect day for water dogs.

With one throw of the stick, Juno instinctively leapt into the water from the steep mud slick banks of the Saco. Bailey eagerly made his way down to the water with out the precocious leap like the labrador pup, rather a precautious zig zag into the flat river water. Juno was already three retrieves in when Bailey made his way to the sand bar to meet us watching with tongue lolling, eyes darting from the stick to the water back to the stick. I held Juno by her collar as I gave Bailey a half throw, he made five steps into the water before he collapsed. I thought he stepped on something sharp but quickly realised it was much worse than that.

Bailey had completely torn his Cruciate Ligament. In dogs this tendon keeps the tibia bone to the femur bone, essentially his leg was hanging by his flesh. Our Vet, Linda Mulski from Animal Hospital of South Gorham, recommended a leading specialist in Tibial Plateau Leveling Osteotomy Leveling surgery located in Portland, Maine for ACL tears in large breed dogs, Marta Agrondia. The TPLO surgery wasn’t inexpensive and the recovery was to be long, but it was the only logical option for Bailey and for us.

We scheduled the consult with Marta, two days after he injured the cruciate ligament.