Trooper, the adorable Lab/Hound mix who arrived from Louisiana back in December, is finally ready for surgery. Judging from the number of emails I’ve received from people asking how he’s doing, I realize I have been remiss in not posting any updates on him since he came. But he is doing just great, and that emaciated dog in December is now completely filled out. We had to hold off on surgery until we could bring him up to normal weight.
I drove Trooper over to our vet clinic in Helena this afternoon, and took the photo of him in the back seat of the truck when I got there. (Actually, we removed most of the back seat to make room for dogs!) This photo makes him look both more serious and more sad than he really is. Trooper is a complete goofball, in fact. He’s a happy, bouncy, funny guy who loves nothing more than to wrestle with Travis, he of fused-jaw fame.
Despite his twisted front leg and his obliterated hip joint, Trooper is one of the fastest dogs we have. We were completely amazed at watching him race across the yard at Widget’s House. His front leg doesn’t seem to bother him at all. When he runs, he simply pulls up the back leg to get it out of the way, and then he just holds it there as he zooms along.
This surgery will be on that hip joint, which you can see in the left of this X-ray (it’s his right side, where the ‘R’ is on the image):
Just compare that hip joint to the other, normal side, and you can see the difference.
The procedure is called a femoral head ostectomy, an operation we have had done on two other dogs at the ranch, Pappy and Chelsea. Our internal medicine specialist in Helena, Dr. Britt Culver, does this surgery.
It will take months for Trooper to fully recuperate from the hip operation, and then we will make a decision about the surgery on his front leg. To be honest, we are not sure about proceeding with that operation after watching how well he gets around. The surgery is very complex, involves lots of rods and pins, and makes the FHO procedure look simple by comparison. Our veterinary surgeon in Spokane who would do the operation on Trooper’s front leg considers the outcome to have only a "fair prognosis." So now that we see the front leg doesn’t seem to bother Trooper, and doesn’t seem to cause him any pain, we are beginning to wonder if we really need to — and should — put him through that. So I’ve asked Britt and our primary care vet, Dr. Brenda Culver, to also evaluate Trooper’s front leg while he’s at the clinic and to let us know what they think.
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In the crate behind Trooper is blind Popeye the cat, who’s had another setback with the operation to remove a painful eye. Over the weekend the eye socket started opening up again, so back to Brenda he went!
Rolling Dog Farm Blog 
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