352 days and counting

After a brief return to some agility - i.e. 3 lots of 3 jumps a couple of weeks ago and the consequence of Kenz coming up not weight bearing on her LH leg and with the intermittent RF lameness still not resolving Emma suggested a return appointment with Penny the ortho specialist might be in order. I wasn't so keen on that as Kenz really didn't feel comfortable with Penny and I wasn't entirely sure what repeating what we had already done was going to show.

With that in mind we had recommendations for another specialist - Dr John Punke at VETSAIR who had recently come over from the states. I emailed John and had such a positive feeling from the emails that I organised to take Kenz to him for a second opinion last Friday.

Well of course I totally eased up all restrictions - let her run hard at the beach and play frisbee to her hearts content in the couple of days prior and come Friday's appointment typically she was not showing any real signs of lameness. She actually hasn't been doing to badly but the agility incident sort of scared me a little and I figured we couldn't keep on doing as we have been and waiting and seeing if she would get back to normal.

An hour later, after a very thorough consultation we had what was a much more confident diagnosis - bicipital injury. It wasn't anything the other specialist hadn't suggested was going on but a consistent pain response, coupled with the ultrasound scans she had back in May were pretty clear cut. John has had a lot of experience with performance dogs and while we both agreed her level of lameness was acceptable as far as a "pet" dog goes it was obviously still bothering her and something more needed to occur if I was going to keep competing with her.

We agreed that if rest alone was going to resolve the issue then it should have done so by now and more aggressive treatment was warranted. The obvious was to go in and cut the biceps tendon which has an excellent success rate and following rehab there would be no doubt she could return to agility. However I was also keen to try the PRP solution that had been originally dismissed by Penny now we had a proper diagnosis.

I put the suggestion to John. While there is no evidence to suggest it might work I figured it was a low risk suggestion and new technology has to start somewhere. Further research online suggests that other specialists overseas recommend it, even though biceps tendon release surgery is fairly issue free, as a step before resorting to surgery. Surgery is never without risks.

So fingers crossed this helps and in the meantime Kenz is back on leash walks and no heavy activity.