When Breeze was young her femur bone was fractured. At a young age the bones are soft and heal quickly so the fracture went unnoticed until Breeze started to grow. The femur bone grew crooked and short. Our option to fix Breeze's leg at the age of 7 months when we discovered why she had an odd gait would have been extensive surgery, braking the crooked femur, straightening and lengthening it two inches. Since Breeze seemed fine other than the odd gait we decided against surgery.
A year later Breeze started to show signs of favoring the short leg. It got to the point where she stopped using her leg all together so we decided to go ahead with the surgery.
February 26, 2003
Dr. Tom Broaddus at the Gateway Animal Hospital in Anderson, Ca. broke Breeze's femur and attached an external leg brace Tom and our good friend Andy Gordon made to lengthen Breeze's leg. He also replaced her torn cruciate ligament with an artificial ligament. For 3 months we lengthened her leg. Breeze accepted the brace and did not seem to mind the lengthening. Once her leg was long enough we waited for the bones to come together and fuse.
July 4, 2003
It was a bad weekend for us. The bones still had not come together and the pins holding the external brace wiggled out of the bone and out of Breeze's leg. Dr Broaddus had to do a second surgery to connect the two ends of the femur with an internal plate and did a bone graft to stimulate bone growth.
February 13, 2004
The screws in the internal plate came out and Breeze had her third surgery to replace the loose screws. The good news is the bones had grown together and it would be just a matter of time before she would use her leg.
The rest of 2004 was a battle with the screws. Breeze's bone kept growing and splitting the screws. By the end of the summer all the screw had split even ones that had been replaced so in October 2004, Breeze had another major surgery and all the screws were replaced.
February 8, 2005 Breeze's leg is slowly getting stronger but it has been an up hill battle with loose screws and infections.
March 2005 Dr Tom removed the internal plate and inserted a rod down the center of the bone.
May 2005 we drove back to Gettysburg for the BMDCA National Specialty and Miss Breeze managed to brake the femur and snap the stainless steel rod in two. We bought her a plane ticket home and Dr. Tom picked her up and put her back together again with a new internal plate and another set of screws.
June 2005 Breeze picked up a staph infection and the summer of 2005 we struggled to get rid of it.
December 2005 she still had an infection so we put her on antibiotics for 3 months but she has lots of bone and is walking on all four.
February 26 2006 will be the three year anniversary of Breeze's first surgery. We will know in Mid March 2006 when we take her off the antibiotics if her staph infection is gone.
