Day 36 - Bee's Dog's knees

In a previous post, I waxed poetic about how we all have bad knees, primarily due to our upright posture. But that was quite speciest of me because dogs have injury-prone knees too. In fact, a few years ago, my dog, Coltrane, tore the equivalent of her ACL. In dogs, its called a cranial cruciate ligament, but it's sometimes referred to as the ACL. Coltrane was facing the threat of the knife too, but she made a miraculous recovery the morning of the surgery. The vet put her under, but after testing her knee, he decided she didn't need the surgery because her knee was pretty solid. That was good news for both of us because I was fearful and nervous for her. You see, the procedure for repairing a torn ACL in dogs is a pretty brutal surgery. To give you a hint of how painful it is, the surgeons use this evil-looking torture device to slice off the top of the tibia:


Yikes! The sight of that may have been what scared Coltrane into rapid healing. The procedure, known as tibial plateau levelling osteotomy, consists of cutting the top of the tibia bone off, repositioning it so the knee functions better and using a plate and screw to hold it in place while it heals. The end result looks like this:


It's apparently a pretty successful procedure. But the thought of slicing off the top of the bone still makes me queasy. Of course, they drilled into mine, and I'm not sure that's any less painful.