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Although TPLO surgery in Rottweilers is fairly common it also comes with a somewhat lengthy recovery period (think about knee replacement surgery in humans – this is almost the same thing). When I picked him up from the surgery he came home with a long list of instructions and covered about 12 weeks – 3 months! The light at the end of the tunnel is both Cooper and Xena went through the same thing and recovered nicely. Kojak is irrepressible and extremely animated so the hardest part is keeping him somewhat quiet (no running, no pouncing on toys, no steps, no jumping up on the furniture – a dog can’t have ANY fun!). Walking him is starting to become problematic as he’s feeling better; he doesn’t understand that just because he’s feeling better he can’t get right back into his normal activities. When we take him out, he’s either rolling in the grass, gobbling goose (I guess) poop and trying to trot; if some deer or geese or squirrels show up, he’s ready to race around and protect me from these interlopers!
I did buy a new “no pull” harness for him and in a future post I’ll compare the old vs new, but for right now I’m using the new one. The new one IS lighter and also IS easier to put on and take off. Generally I take his cone off when I take him for his first walk of the day and put the harness on him. It’s so lightweight I just leave it on him all day (one less thing to do each time I take him out) and take it off at bed time.
Here’s some of the other things we’ve gone through this week:
His surgical leg did swell quite a bit. The surgeon had warned us it would swell for the first 3 days then should return close to normal in about 5 days and it sure did. However now his leg is close to normal size although he is still “toe touching” and keeping some of the weight off that leg when he’s standing still.
Kojak’s walking is getting a little better each day – he still limps a little on that side but he CAN stand on it. He is having very little problem standing on that leg to, er, eliminate. Our yard has almost no level ground and he is navigating the slope fairly well. Kojak has recovered enough that he can once again give the leash a workout by pulling – we’ve got to get that corrected!
Probably the most frustrating thing is his continual assault on the “cone of shame”. I understand, he’s not used to it, he doesn’t understand why he’s wearing it and all he wants to do is lick the parts that hurt – that’s the only thing he knows to do to make it feel better. I feel bad for him and hate having to put the cone on him, but it’s really for his own good and will only be for a relatively short time. Still it is annoying to be lying in bed in the morning and hear him downstairs chewing on the cone. We did buy another cone so we have a backup. In the meantime, as any other guy would do, his cone is held together with that most magical of substances, duct tape.
One of the biggest disappointments was the lick sleeve. I brought him home wearing the lick sleeve but there was something wrong with either the design of the sleeve or the way they had put it on. Had we taken him out for an elimination walk, it would have gotten all over the lick sleeve (yuck!). So we took it off and he’s been fine without it. However, one night he was really working on the cone and I thought he might actually succeed in breaking off the cone. I decided to try the lick sleeve again as a fail safe if he actually did succeeded.
Of course as soon as we decided to put the sleeve on him Kojak splayed on the floor like a puddle of Rottweiler and became about as cooperative as your average 2 year old getting dressed in a snow suit. We got down on the floor with him (I’m not the most limber guy you’ll ever meet) and eased the sleeve on his leg then spent time trying to pass the various parts under Kojak (yes, try getting your hand under 100 pounds of Rottweiler and passing a compression strap to someone else).
The sleeve itself slides on the injured leg and it’s a tight fit – think compression stockings. Then there’s this long strap attached to the top of the sleeve which is supposed to go around his abdomen twice (why twice? I don’t know). After going around his abdomen twice, the strap is supposed to buckle into a catch on the top of the sleeve itself (which is uncomfortably close to his tail). I don’t know what went wrong, whether we wound it around his abdomen in the wrong direction or put it on upside down or what but we couldn’t figure out how to clip the strap into the sleeve. And we could see that even if we got it snapped, we’d have to remove the whole sleeve before taking him out for an elimination run. After 15 minutes crawling on the floor and trying to figure this out, we just gave up and took it off him and hoped the cone would last the night. With some engineered application of duct tape, the cone is still on him and still doing the job.
Kojak does what Xena used to do which is lay on his stomach and put one leg straight out behind him; Cooper never did this. With both Xena and Kojak I was worried they would lose that ability after having the TPLO surgery. Thankfully I saw Kojak laying that way this morning so it doesn’t appear the surgery has affected that ability.
We moved his pen upstairs to the first floor so we had some place to confine him while he was living on one floor. He spends about two hours a day in his pen as we usually put him in there just after he eats dinner so we can eat OUR dinner in relative peace. He doesn’t like going in the pen while he’s wearing the cone because it catches on the door (at times I think he is actually TRYING to catch the cone on everything he can). So we take the cone off, lure him into his pen, then go into the pen with him and put the cone back on. Of course we have to do the entire procedure in reverse when it’s time to let him out of his pen. While he’s IN the pen, he usually spends a few minutes grumbling and moving around, then falls fast asleep (he has a bed in there and he even uses it sometimes) and we have to wake him up to take him out for the final walk of the day.
Kojak’s surgeon was not keen on keeping him in a crate – she said he needs to move around more and not be strictly confined. She DID approve of the pen which is about 5 feet by 5 feet as it gives him some room to move around.
He likes his pen way better than a standard dog crate and we’re not sure why, maybe it’s because it’s open on top or maybe because it’s a little bigger than a crate. When we have people in the house (guests with small children, our house cleaner and so on), he happily spends most of his day in his pen. The only difference now is he doesn’t have any toys in his pen – he’s not allowed to play with toys since that may cause him to jump around and pounce which would detrimental during at least this initial recovery period.
We’ve got a week to go before his sutures are removed, then another 3 days before we can dispense with the cone. I for one am looking forward to getting rid of the cone and I bet Kojak is too!
Update: Read about Kojak’s TPLO recovery week 2.
