Élan - Surgery

Élan Chercher

Élan has had a malformed right elbow for several years now. It finally got to the point that she was in constant pain, so we had to do something about it. We looked into elbow replacement, but her bones were too small for the existing joints for dogs and too large for the cat ones, so we had to do an elbow fusion. Below are some of the photos after the surgery.

Well, she's been through 3 surgery's and will have at least one more.

Élan's MSRA infection in her elbow has flared up again. This time antibiotics don't seem to be doing anything. She's had a drain surgically installed, it's been in for a couple weeks and then removed. Still on more antibiotics to see if it can be cleared up.

The infection got a lot worse. It got into the bone and casused it to get so brittle, her fused elbow broke. The infection being in there so long has caused the bone to be brittle, about like honeycomb.

There are two options, but only one we would consider. Amputate her right front leg. Hopefully by doing that, all the MRSP infection that is there is in the joint. By amputating it, we hope to get the infected and damaged bone/joint, plus any infection that may have spread to the surrounding tissue.

This is the same infection that she came down with at MEDVET when her elbow was fused. The thought is that it was never cleared up, just in "remission" and movement of some loose bone fragments in the elbow area re-aggravated it.