Right Knee - Final Weeks

October 19, 2006

Tomorrow marks week 9 for Murphy's right knee.

The plan is to drop him off at 7 am at South Paws so that he can be sedate early enough for Dr. Brehm to take the final x-ray of Murphy's and determine if all has healed correctly. If everything looks good, he will be cleared for surgery on his left knee, and surgery will take place later tomorrow afternoon. We are hoping that Murphy will still be sedated from his first x-ray when they take the x-ray needed to calculate the slope for his left knee. That way he will hopefully be able to head directly into surgery, never knowing what is going on.

We aren't anticipating any problems, and we are hopeful that we will be picking him up early Saturday morning, just like the last surgery.

We made sure to take care of all the pre-surgery items that we forgot last time, like giving him a bath and trimming his toenails. We were a bit worried about his right knee because of it looking bowed, but we are now confident that it is strong enough to support him during his healing of the left knee. During his bath, he lifted his left leg while Rob was washing him. He had no problem balancing on his new bionic right knee. We figure that since he was comfortable enough to initiate that type of response that it has healed as expected.

Rob and I are dreading dropping him off tomorrow. Simply because Murphy is finally back to his old self. He has crunched down a couple of times this week and starting barking at us because he wants to play. Poor thing, he gets yelled at every time he does it because we know that after his vocal expressions, he'll start running around like a dog on crack if we'd let him. Tomorrow will start the process all over again; we are sad about it, but anxious to just get it over with. I guess we can now officially say "We are half way done!"

We'll keep you posted!