three pins and a compression wire are holding the growth plates in my knee in place…

Kaiju's Right Knee

My humans came to see me and then left me after 45 min. I’m really mad.

What is this thing around my neck anyway?

And everything hurts.

We have found out the cause of Kaiju’s slow recovery. He actually has had a fracture on the right knee all this time. Here is more info.

So the clinic not only dropped him (due to a careless maneuver of an already injured puppy) and fractured his right knee, but also did not find out with the first set of Xrays and the examinations that it was a fracture. As a result, they encouraged us to move him around while masking his pain with the pain medication. We did just that for 10 days, making the fracture even worse and therefore harder to fix, until they called us back for another set of X-rays. As far as I am concerned, those two very unfortunate errors broke our poor Kaiju.

We took him to an emergency room at the biggest animal hospital in the area, based to our vet’s referral. We walked in with the X-ray pictures taken today at the clinic. I had never been at this hospital. It’s huge. And it’s set up just like a human hospital (I guess it’s normal). It was clean, and everyone was very nice, but at the same time, a lot more business-like than our regular clinic.

Kaiju has been admitted and we’ll wait for a call tomorrow morning from an orthopedic surgeon about more specific plans for him. We just hope that our vet clinic will do the right thing and cover all costs for the surgery, as wellas any cares/treatments necessary after-(long-after)ward, without making it difficult for us. We won’t be covered by the insurance now for those problems, either, because this is a big fat pre-existing condition.

Nobuko and I are both so distraught right now… Kaiju was playing with his half-sister, Stella, at the dog park, when he suddenly sat down. It was obvious something was up… but, he was determined to keep playing. That’s when we noticed him limping around. We immediately took action to keep him from over-exerting his injured left hind leg. It obviously was bothering him, but he seemed well enough to carefully ride it out the rest of the day (a Sunday) until the morning when we would take him to see his vet. The doctor said that it seemed his knee was a bit swollen, but that he was putting ‘some’ weight on it. It all led him to believe that some anti-inflammatory and some rest would do the trick… or at least to start with that, and we’ll see how he progresses. After the diagnosis, he asked the vet technician to weigh him (having just turned 4 months old today, he just grows and grows).

… but that’s when the unthinkable happened.

Just as the tech was putting him down, he squirmed, and she let him go and dropped him from maybe just below waist height, to the hard tiled floor! He let out a HUGE shiba scream… and now… well, now, his OTHER LEG IS EVEN WORSE,  probably because he was compensating for his originally injured leg on the landing. What a horrible, horrible turn of events… the poor guy can’t walk at all right now, as both hind legs are injured. He’s currently getting x-rayed… so we are just left hoping for the best. Nobuko and I stepped out of the office and just held each other tight.

mr. chunkyhead spends his 4 month birthday in a crate at the vets

UPDATE…

x-rays came back negative… so the vet says it is most likely soft-tissue injuries to his rear knees. We were given some medication that will hopefully make him more comfortable, and we’ll see how he does over the next day. What a morning this turned out to be.

UPDATE #2…

Kaiju is back with us now, but he can barely walk at all. Thankfully, he seems content just sleeping all day! We are hoping to see big improvements tomorrow. Hoping.

UPDATE #3…

10 days later we find out, it was fractured after all…