Meet Stella, a gorgeous 7 year old mastiff cross. She arrived with an enormous wound in the area of her left knee. It was thought she may have injured herself on some tin sheeting.

Unfortunately there was severe damage with exposed bone and joint tissue.

These rare injuries are extremely hard to repair. They often have lots of complications.  It is a poor prognosis for a functional pain free leg. For all of these reasons, it is often kinder to consider an amputation. They recover  rapidly. This thought is often quite confronting to owners.

We used strong pain relief, iv fluids and antibiotics to stabilise Stella. All of this needed to happen before an amputation was performed. Dogs often recover very fast. Stella did. The next day she went home for rest and TLC

This was her (and us) at her recheck after a few days. She is travelling well, up and about and starting short on lead walks