The Truman Show, Part I
No… this is hardly about Jim Carrey’s blockbuster hit in 1998. It’s also not about the x-president. I thought it was time to introduce the internet to Truman, our dog. Truman deserves a lengthy introduction since he’s been through a lot of hard times in the two and a half years he’s been alive.
My wife and I adopted Truman through the Norcal Golden Retriever Rescue organization back in January 2002. At one year and two months, he was a pretty tame puppy… certainly, tamer than most goldens at that age. Turns out that his mild puppy personality was more or less due to a freak accident that happened to him at his owner’s farm. A few months before the owners decided to put him up for adoption, his leg got caught in gate and ended up fracturing his hip.
At the time, his vet mended the hip back together with some surgical wires and said that it would take a few months for it to heal. A few months after we adopted him, we took him back to his vet to see how he was progressing. The long and short of it was that he wasn’t healing. The hip has actually become worse. After discussions about what needed to be done to fix his hip, the vet recommend two different procedures:
* Total Hip Replacement
* Femoral Head Ostectomy (FHO)
The first procedure is a more anatomically correct procedure since it replaces the head of the femur with a ball-like joint similar to what was there to begin with. An FHO on the other hand, is a procedure to remove the ball-like joint from the femur. The femur in turn will heal with a cartilage matter which will act as the new ball-joint. An FHO can’t work for humans because we walk upright, but works really well for canines. However, the seemingly popular opinion in the vet community is that a total hip replacement is the more superior solution. So, we went with that.
We ended up having the surgery performed up at the renowned UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital. The surgery went well — no complications or surprises. However, after a week, we noticed that aside from the limping, which is normal after this type of surgery, he just didn’t seem right. So, when it was time to take Truman back up to Davis to have his sutures removed, we mentioned to the doctor that something seemed weird. The surgeon that operated on him thought he looked fine. However, the head of the vet school took a look at him and thought that his hip had poped out of joint. Sure enough, it did. So, after trying to manually pop the joint back into place (which was a painful experience for Truman), they ended up performing a second surgery to pop the joint back in.
To be continued…