Visited Sammy at the clinic

Around 5 PM, I received a call from the clinic letting me know that they have already taken the x-rays they needed for the surgery. The excellent news was that they didn't need to put Sammy under anesthesia to do the x-rays because he behave perfectly just with some sedatives. I was so proud of my awesome dog!!!

At 7 PM, Julie, La Negra and I went to visit Sammy at the clinic. He was all drugged up and was falling asleep all the time. They took him to a visiting room where we could hang out with him, so I felt a little bad for disturbing him while he was already under medication. At least, he got to smell us one more time to be able to have a good and normal night at the clinic.

The surgery is tomorrow sometime during the morning. They are going to call to let us know how everything is going.

Tightrope surgery day

Sammy and I drove to Bellevue WA to see Dr. Mihai Aluas and get the Tightrope surgery for Sammy. We woke up at 4 AM to get ready and start the trip, but I barely slept anything anyway.

The drive took 3 1/2 hours because the traffic got really bad getting to

Bellevue, so we ended up taking some country roads, which were also crowded, but we made it on time for our appointment at 8:30 AM.

Dr. Aluas took Sammy for x-rays after chatting a little bit with me and meeting Sammy. I went and waited at the front desk for maybe 15 minutes. When Dr. Aluas came back, was to give me the bad news that Sammy has a very steep TPA, so the surgery would not work for him. Dr. Aluas recommended TTA or TPLO for Sammy instead of the Tightrope technique. Although it wasn't what I wanted to hear, it was the first time we got the level of knowledge and communication that I expected.

Dr. Aluas recommended the TTA technique because he had good experiences with it and it's less invasive than the TPLO surgery. The TTA technique relies on changing the forces in the knee to stabilize it by cutting the front of the tibia and pushing it forward with an 

spacer. The change of the angle happens without changing the load bearing parts of the tibia, so the technique its a little safer on that regard. Also, if anything goes wrong and the bone breaks under the screws, it's easier to fix a TTA than a TPLO surgery. If we decided to do the TTA we had to wait for 2 weeks and make another trip to Bellevue. We decided to wait and research some more. Dr. Aluas said that there was no urgency to do the surgery as longs as I
keep taking good care of Sammy as I have been doing. He did see some fluid on his knee, which can cause inflammation and therefore pain, but he gave us more medicine to take with us.

Andres.

More research for Sammy's surgery

I continued searching online to understand the surgical options a little more. I am not going any further with the non-surgical options anymore since it seems to be an agreement that Sammy could not get better without surgery.

I searched the Slocum Enterprises web page for licensed TPLO surgeons. Luckily there are more than just the guys from the awful Cascade Referral Center.

I also found very good information about a new technique called Tightrope CCL developed by Dr. James Cook from MU.

Dog Knee Injury

Human treatment applied to dogs

Article in the Missourian

Arthrex

KTVZ article

I contacted the manufacturers of the products for Tightrope and obtained a list of veterinarians that use the technique in my area and started calling them. I found one in town and one relatively close in Washington.