Henrietta's Diagnosis

As many of you know, our dog Henrietta suffered a ruptured ligament in her left knee two years ago. She required surgery to stabilize her knee, but she was a healthy 5 year old with lots of energy, and her prognosis was good. We opted to go with the cheapest surgery, an LSS surgery, which we could barely afford at almost $3,000.00. Henrietta was in a lot of pain, and it took her a long time to heal. She slowly had to learn to use her leg again because it didn't work the same way as before. Her muscles had atrophied during the 8 weeks it took for her incision to heal because we had to keep her inactive. Her left leg only started to really build back a lot of muscle this spring, even though we could tell her knee gave her a lot of pain. Recently it began to creak and pop with every step she took.

Over the Easter weekend, two years to the day in fact (which makes me feel sick to say), she suffered the same injury to her right knee. She will need another surgery, but this time she is an arthritic 7 year old. We took her to our vet this morning, where she was sedated for x-rays. He confirmed that she had ruptured the ligaments in her knee.

Our veterinarian told us that we won't be able to do the same kind of surgery again because Henrietta's knees are very worn down from arthritis, and the knee he operated on has worn down much more than he expected, and doesn't look too good after the past 2 years. He says she has a much better chance of preserving her mobility by getting a TPLO surgery. We tried to get her into Texas A&M for surgery, where the procedures can cost half as much, but they were fully booked until the end of April. We have an appointment to meet with a surgeon in Sugarland tomorrow morning, and we will hopefully be getting a low price estimate, but our research is showing the TPLO surgery to cost between $3,000.00 and $5,000.00.

I will be completely honest: I have no idea how we are going to pay for all of this. I have placed a donate button at the top right corner of this blog. If you can spare anything to help us pay for Henrietta's surgery, we would greatly appreciate it! Even a single dollar helps. Your donations are sent through Paypal, and placed right into our savings account.

I will keep this blog up to date so that you will be able to follow Henrietta's progress on her road to recovery.