So sad for Murphy

Murphy has been struggling now for awhile with walking. It's not constant, but there are a lot of times where he favors both of his back legs. You know it's bothering him, but then he's okay to run like crazy with Tars and the other dogs. That makes it kind of hard to gauge how serious the injury is. With the way he's been moving, I assumed it might be arthritis even though he's really young for that. It's gotten even worse these past few days, so today Nate took him to the vet. Turns out poor Murphy has luxation of the patella. That means dislocation of the knee cap. He has it in both of his hind legs. In order to determine the course of treatment, they have four classifications of luxation of the patella. One being the least serious, four being the most severe. One of his little legs is a 3 which means that the knee cap dislocates and relocates itself. It's considered to be permanently dislocated, but if Murphy fully extends his leg, then it goes back. The other leg is a four. This means that it's permanently dislocated and there is nothing to be done about it. If we don't have surgery done on both legs, then he will pretty much become a crippled dog and his quality of life will be yucky. This is pretty major surgery. He'll be bandaged up for nearly a week and then we'll have several weeks of rehab and we'll have to watch him like a hawk to make sure that he doesn't get too crazy with his movements. *sigh* I just feel SO bad for him right now. He's such a good puppy and it's so hard to see him in so much pain. Most evenings he just lays around. He's definitely not the spunky puppy he used to be. There's no guarantee that the surgery will completely cure him, but without it, he will be in bad shape. He's pretty much guaranteed to have arthritis problems because of this. I'm just so bummed right now. I hate it when any of our furbabies are hurting. Now we just have to decide when the best time for surgery is. Murphy's normal vet was out of the office today, so we'll wait to get all the details from him. Anywho, I'll post more this weekend. I just wanted to post about this first.

Off to get the Libster to bed :)