Part 5 of 6

Discover expert puppy orthopedic care in Dr. Andrea Hesser’s 6 Part Breeding Masterclass with Pro Club—featuring rehab plans, Neospora insights, and socialization.

Transcript

0:00 
We're still following my Singleton puppy with all of her odds and ends that have been going on.

0:05 
So what we're going to do, I know this was our original plan again.

0:10 
So what we're going to do instead of talking about outdoor spaces and just outdoor spaces, I was thinking originally with the litter of four, like playing in the yard and we'd just like hang out outside and talk about outside space that we had.

0:22 
But we got a lot more stuff that we can talk about.

0:25 
So I'm going to show you guys some of the socialization measures that we've been taking for her, some which would be specific for her being a Singleton.

0:32 
And then we're also going to talk about some of the orthopedic stuff that we've started doing for her leg.

0:38 
So last week, this was the last slide that you guys had.

0:43 
So she's quite smaller.

0:45 
I don't know how big she was at that point, but she was, we were pending our Neospora test.

0:50 
So that's the parasitic disease that we were worried about based on her clinical signs, even without a history of her having a mother that was fed raw or herself having been exposed to raw food.

1:02 
We were kind of seeking consults from a lot of people.

1:05 
I had already started visiting with some of the rehab sports medicine, chiro acupuncture people and had been talking with people on the phone, but have since had some consults as well that we'll visit about.

1:17 
And then also just we were kind of introducing her new environment.

1:26 
I moved her kind of from my bedroom into her a little bit bigger pen space that was about A 4 by 4 X pen that I had set up for her and started doing some kind of Singleton specific things mostly like noisy toys and things like that.

1:42 
So how is she?

1:43 
So she is doing excellent really overall.

1:47 
She's very active and tries to use her leg that's stiff all the time She's not.

1:54 
So she's you might actually be able to hear her complaining in the background.

1:58 
She's become very opinionated about things and I would say like, you know, developmental milestones wise with kind of her play styles and introductions to like my adult dogs.

2:10 
Her neurologic status has not changed.

2:13 
She has continued not to have seizures or head tremors after being treated with Clindamycin for a while for that presumed Neospora diagnosis.

2:21 
She is 10 lbs now.

2:23 
She's 10.2 lbs today and eating vigorously.

2:28 
She's transitioned from we had her on Royal Canin starter, the like canned puppy starter at first.

2:36 
She's now pretty much just on the soaked or semi soaked version of pro plan.

2:43 
It's the sensitive skin and stomach puppy salmon, which is what her mom eats.

2:50 
So that is kind of where we're at as far as things go.

2:54 
She is 6 weeks old today.

2:55 
So this is technically six weeks from her delivery date.

2:58 
And her prognosis, I think at this point, her prognosis for her in general is great.

3:03 
Her prognosis with her left leg and her rear leg is iffy.

3:09 
We are seeing some positive progress this week, but we'll kind of show you the process on that.

3:16 
So just to kind of review where we've been and who we've been talking to.

3:20 
So I initially had visited with Doctor Torres, which is the rehab and chiropractic person.

3:25 
She also does acupuncture.

3:27 
That's down about an hour from me.

3:29 
Doctor Torres happens to have a small animal practice that focuses just on those things, and she happens to also breed occasionally.

3:36 
So she had a really good knowledge on like what puppies should feel like.

3:39 
I took her to her at about 3 weeks old and had initially been starting work based on kind of just her kind of having that stiff leg.

3:48 
Well, eventually when we thought it was Neospora, she started having seizures.

3:52 
I kind of pushed backward and went to a neuro small animal internal medicine specialist, including Doctor Davidson, who is she's really more therio.

4:04 
She is a small animal internal medicine specialist, but was because therio did not exist.

4:11 
So reproduction was not a specific thing that you could pursue as a boarded license when she graduated and pursued her licenses.

4:20 
So she pursued internal medicine to look at reproduction.

4:24 
Is also a breeder herself.

4:25 
She has Labradors.

4:27 
So and then I had a couple of surgical consults.

4:30 
So one that Doctor Torres had connected me to was here in town in Grapevine, which is just 20 minutes from my house.

4:38 
He really didn't want to see her till she was 7 or 8 weeks old and I just kept looking at how she's moving and getting more concerned about this 115 LB dog.

4:48 
And you know, eventually that's basically not using her left rear leg other than to support weight.

4:57 
I would say 20% of the time she sometimes drags her toes because things are so extended that she doesn't actually really use it.

5:05 
She will maneuver around with it, but is pretty much using it 100% of the time.

5:10 
Just as occasional support that is not going to be productive.

5:14 
If that leg eventually weighs 15 lbs, it's not going to be a functional leg.

5:18 
And I would think, you know eventually that it could be something that needs to be amputated was my concern.

5:25 
I want to be as aggressive as I can right now.

5:27 
So that was my feeling was whoever will see me the soonest.

5:33 
So Doctor Torres reached out to another person that she really likes.

5:36 
That's further from me.

5:37 
He's about two hours from my house and he's a little bit more of a cowboy, for lack of a better term.

5:46 
He has both small animal and large animal clientele and does he's a boarded surgeon.

5:52 
That's on the other, like I said, the other side of Dallas, Fort Worth.

5:56 
We went over there for him to feel her and he consulted on some of her X-rays and has been able to direct us now.

6:04 
So even though she's not quite old enough to have consulted over with some of the other specialists that were in town, we went ahead and have started some work based on his consult.

6:14 
So and then there's just 100 other people chirping with ideas and suggestions.

6:19 
And honestly, this is one of those things, if you get 100 consultations, you will get 100 answers.

6:25 
And this is not a simple case, unfortunately.

6:30 
I think that was part of my downfall in managing initially was because I got too many, there's just too many people that have that have opinions based on their specialty interest.

6:41 
And I don't know that there was a perfect person to be an overhead umbrella to say like this is the best way to approach this.

6:49 
But we're here now, we're doing well.

6:51 
I think surgery is going to be the way to go at this point or surgeon management.

6:55 
So orthopedic surgeons kind of help helping direct us as well as rehab and such.

6:59 
Since her neurologic signs have gone away, Neuro is still consulting on testing for Neospora itself.

7:06 
So she was negative and her mom Cabana was negative on 4/3.

7:11 
So we actually got those results later that day after we saw you.

7:14 
We were visiting with you guys last time at the last installment.

7:18 
So we did send out testing last week.

7:21 
We will probably get it back later this week.

7:25 
I also did a CBC and a chemistry panel on her kind of in anticipation that she was going to be sedated and out of curiosity, everything was normal for her age.

7:35 
It won't match the ranges.

7:37 
Can you hear her?

7:39 
It won't match the ranges that that are produced.

7:42 
So if you send this say on a regular IDEX machine at your clinic, just keep in mind if you see a whole bunch of red, that is not abnormal because puppy ranges are not going to be the exact same as the ranges they produce for the adult dogs.

7:57 
There are no puppy ranges built into those computer systems.

8:00 
So we have to go and look at those numbers separately.

8:04 
OK.

8:05 
So overall consensus though, so everybody's on the Therio Neuro side is very confident this is Neospora.

8:14 
It would be a series of very unfortunate events if not and just really bad coincidences.

8:20 
But surgery seems to think that it could be.

8:24 
I mean, it could be Neospora, but surgery feels pretty confident that what her leg is doing is her quad.

8:30 
So the big muscle in the front of the thigh has stuck to the periosteum, or the outside of the bone.

8:36 
And they think that that reaction may have come from an abscess that then showed up as the skin lesion, even though I never had any heat, she never had any pain.

8:45 
She's got no history of trauma.

8:47 
She was literally in a padded cell.

8:49 
She's by herself.

8:49 
She doesn't have a littermate to, you know, poke a hole with a nail through her skin or, you know, even some like really extreme jump.

8:58 
I didn't give her any injections around then.

9:01 
It just, there's nothing that I can say that would have introduced it but could have occurred spontaneously.

9:07 
It just would be really, really unlucky.

9:09 
An abscess could relate though.

9:11 
So a dermatitis situation with, you know, with an abscess could be associated with Neosporus primarily.

9:20 
So it might not have been bacterial in origin.

9:22 
His feeling, though, the surgeon's feeling was that he thinks it most likely fits with one of those two.

9:28 
So either a bacterial or this parasitic version of things.

9:34 
The thing that we can't fit with if it's just an infection is why did she have seizures?

9:38 
Well, maybe she had so much inflammation from that leg or some really dramatic things that we couldn't perceive because we weren't able to get blood work on her that young.

9:48 
Maybe there was some changes that caused that type of change or behavior could be completely unrelated.

9:54 
Maybe she had some head trauma that I didn't see or, you know, something happened that I didn't appreciate.

10:00 
But again, we try to merge things as one idea.

10:03 
So when dogs get sick or you know, whatever it is a person, usually there's one thing that's responsible for all of the things that present.

10:13 
So we're just trying to make it make sense at this point.

10:16 
And also the thing that wouldn't make sense per se would be the littermate losses.

10:19 
So why did we lose the littermates if not for Neospora?

10:22 
We are still pending that test.

10:25 
Like I said, even if she's negative, there are some dogs that are really hard to test for this because it does not float around in your bloodstream.

10:33 
What we're measuring is antibodies to the parasite or to the protozoan.

10:40 
OK, so some other happier updates just to show you guys my kind of setup.

10:46 
So I had an indoor pen expansion in this kind of same timeline while we're doing all this other stuff.

10:52 
I also have an outdoor pen.

10:53 
I'll show you guys.

10:55 
I've edited a little bit of what I planned for her because she's not as mobile.

10:59 
So instead of doing like raised I was, I had some like fake grass that I was going to put in like a little bit more of a raised setting for pottying.

11:10 
You can see I've got 2 sets of potty pads on either side of the pen.

11:14 
Instead, I have converted to not changing this because I didn't want to give her an additional challenge to step up to, even though she really likes, you can see that board the little blue square that's next to the crate and the crate itself, she is so cute.

11:31 
She'll get into that crate and put herself to bed sometimes.

11:35 
Like she loves being up on things.

11:37 
She likes climbing, she wants to climb.

11:39 
It's just she's a little bit more having more difficulty.

11:43 
So I've introduced a lot of noise toys and playlists.

11:48 
So I'm, I'm using Spotify playlists.

11:50 
There actually are puppy socialization playlists out there that you can use.

11:55 
I've also just like picked the most annoying playlist possible sometimes.

12:01 
And then I have introduced her.

12:02 
I'll show you some pictures with some other litter, another litter that I know of that's owned by a good friend of mine, and she did not appreciate this.

12:15 
She wants nothing to do with these Tibetan terrier puppies, but it's still good for her to see them, to interact with them.

12:22 
Basically, I had to force their interaction.

12:24 
I would sit next to this little bed where all those puppies would get in there and snuggle with each other and I would set her in there with them and she did not want to be in there.

12:32 
I think she it was a new space.

12:34 
This was the first time she was exposed and I'm planning on going back over there next week.

12:38 
We're trying to do like weekly visits over there.

12:41 
I also have a friend with some Ridgeback puppies that I think are just going to be too active for her.

12:46 
So I'm choosing not to socialize yet with them until we figure out more stuff with her leg.

12:53 
I also had a tip actually from another breeder that was brilliant.

12:56 
She used a mirror for a bull mastiff puppy that she had to just provide another puppy in in their view.

13:03 
And her puppy, she said, was super social without having met other puppies and ended up being really in a positive outcome with just the mirror addition.

13:15 
But I think I've just put a big long mirror.

13:18 
It's like a $7.00 mirror from Walmart on the backside of the pen that she spends the most of her time in.

13:24 
And she sometimes she'll like zoomie and play and do all sorts of things.

13:28 
And then I have this outdoor yard.

13:30 
She really wants to get up on a lot of these things.

13:33 
She really does not like this little yard, though.

13:36 
She doesn't want to be in there by herself.

13:37 
So sometimes I make Cabana hang out in there with her or I'll go sit in there with her just so that she, like explores a little bit more.

13:43 
But she has not taken so much to the outdoor pen.

13:45 
She loves being outside and getting, you know, climbing around just in the yard on like up and across some of these little bricks that I've got kind of across the yard where it's just, it's grassy.

13:57 
She can maneuver a lot of that kind of stuff just with a little bit of time.

14:03 
All right, so just an update on her leg.

14:05 
So we got some more consults.

14:07 
Like I said, the feeling of the acupuncture chiro rehab person was she felt like the difference between week 3 and week 5 was dramatic in a bad way.

14:18 
So she when we felt her in week 5 last week, she recommended I do radiographs.

14:23 
I was already going up to the clinic anyway, so these are the same view on two different legs.

14:29 
So the left side, sorry, it's a little bit backwards.

14:32 
The left picture of the flexed knee is her right leg.

14:36 
That's her right leg the same day that we took this picture on the left side.

14:39 
So that is her that is the most flexed that her leg will be on the left side on Thursday last week.

14:48 
So the treatment for this once we talked to the surgeon and he felt her, he said, yes.

14:52 
You know, she's a really good candidate for forced flexion.

14:55 
Forced flexion just means we make this joint close.

14:58 
Believe it or not, this is a post.

15:01 
You cannot bend it.

15:02 
Even under anesthesia, you cannot bend it.

15:04 
The idea is we eventually break down the muscle enough.

15:12 
Sorry about that.

15:12 
If that looked wild.

15:14 
It was just frozen on my screen.

15:15 
So we bend the leg under anesthesia and we provide tension.

15:21 
Eventually we get it closed enough or flexed enough that we could put a bandage on it to keep it under tension.

15:26 
We started this yesterday.

15:29 
I can tell you we made some serious progress today.

15:31 
That's why you can hear her complaining in the background.

15:33 
She's still a little bit dysphoric.

15:34 
So this is what I just did this morning.

15:37 
So you can see on the left that's me trying to flex that knee.

15:42 
She cannot flex that knee.

15:43 
That is, it is straight as a post.

15:45 
And you can see I could get a little bit of give in her in her hock, but not in her knee.

15:50 
Basically after massage and breaking down physically breaking down some of the tissue that's like adhesions, some of the fascial tissue starts to loosen up.

16:01 
And I eventually got her to that much progression.

16:04 
We basically on the first day that left picture is where we started and where we ended.

16:09 
We really didn't do a whole lot of progress that day.

16:13 
We're going to do this again tomorrow, hopefully get her into a bandage.

16:16 
This is the difference of what those two days look like.

16:19 
So straight as a post on the left and on the right, you can see, it actually looks like a knee now.

16:27 
So, all right, so that is all I have for you today.