A week ago today (1/2/2021) Cookie underwent her second Tibial Plateau Levelling Osteotomy (TPLO) surgery in three years. This time it was her left cruciate which had ruptured, and though it was devastating it wasn’t totally unexpected. Though I’ve seen no actual evidence it seems a very common occurrence for dogs to suffer a second injury once the first has happened.

So today we are a week post op and she is a lot more comfortable but obviously still struggling with some pain and lack of mobility. This time round the recovery is noticeably slower as she is now older (nearly 9) and suffering arthritis in her right leg and left elbow. If she is anything though she is a battler, and we are seeing daily improvement and hopefully in a week she’ll be able to start small 5 minute walks.

These early weeks are very hard for everyone, obviously her, but it’s tough to watch them going through it. Keeping them calm is really crucial which really means not getting her excited and keeping her away from the other dogs and confined on her own.

We are lucky that we have a room which is perfect and has it’s own access outside for toileting. Because of the wound she has a buster collar which is to be worn at all times unless she can be watched. For this reason someone is spending all day in the adjacent room and we have managed to set up a camera to keep an eye on her if she moves out of sight. This way she can have the collar on just for just a few hours overnight and we can still be sure that she keeps her wound clean.

This morning she was sitting at the gate listening to all the usual family noises going on around the house. It looks really sad but it’s the first time she’s been moving around that much since she came home so we’re taking it as a positive.

For anybody about to go through a TPLO surgery we did a series of blog posts when Cookie had her first operation which you can find here in old blogs. These were written from the perspective of somebody with absolutely no previous experience of this. It looked at the things that worked for us and those that didn’t. We also included our experience with our insurance company and hopefully some of these posts may help others.

I am optimistically thinking that as the spring arrives it brings with it an end to our forced isolation and a recovery for Cookie. The dream is to get her back on the beach and to our ‘houseonwheels’ in North Wales….here’s hoping.