Pet Forum / Miscellaneous / Animal Health / February 2004

Sorry to not follow usual protocol and lurk for awhile before just up
and posting something; time is an issue here.

Back in December my dog, a 70ish pound lab, was caught in a trap for
much too long in below-zero weather. By the time I found him, his front
left leg was frozen stiff from the wrist joint down. We rushed him to
the vet, loaded him with antibiotics, and spent the next weeks nursing
over him, feeling sad and guilty, and watching the paw swell up like a
balloon and watching lots of skin rot and fall off. It reached a point
where there was a big deep cavity behind the toes, with visible bones
and everything.

Frostbite is really, really bad. Seriously: winter could kill 'ya. I've
lived here most of my life, but I've never really experienced this fact.

We've been into the vet several times and the plan has been to wait and
see how much of the paw survives before leaping in and amputating the
leg. If the paw goes, it's better to take off the whole thing -- because
it would be useless and unbalancing, just hanging there and not reaching
the ground.

So here's how far we've come: The swelling has gone down a lot but it's
still big, he's grown an amazing amount of new skin and hair and even
claws, but there's still one open spot -- and now we took him in a
couple days ago and the doctor thinks the leg has to come off. He says
he expected it would be a lot better than this by now, if it was going
to be OK. He says there's still a lot of necrotic tissue down inside
there, decaying, and it's pushing out through that sore, and it'll just
keep doing that and doing that (I may not be conveying his description
accurately; any flakiness should be attributed to me).

I'd welcome comments from anybody with experience in this area -- but
I'm mostly looking for a way to choose another vet to ask about this.

I'd feel much better if I at least had solid confirmation that this is
the only way to go. I'm in central Minnesota; Fargo is a relatively easy
drive from here. I've spent the last couple of hours looking around the
web to see if there's some kind of consumer-info vet recommendation site
out there. If there is, I can't find it.

I trust my vet, he's a longtime family friend, and I don't really have
serious doubts that he's right. But for something so major and
heart-wrenchingly awful, I want to be sure I've done everything
reasonable for my little buddy. I know that if he has to join the ranks
of 3-legged dogs, he'll be the smartest, bounciest, most wonderful
3-legged dog in the world. And he'll stop licking his foot, too. But
damn: there was an awful lot of trauma there. The pressure of the trap,
doubtless struggling to get free... what if it's just taking a lot
longer than expected to heal up? It seems so terrible to put him through
this for so long, grow all that nice new hair and skin -- and then just
cut it off anyway.

Well, there -- I'll appreciate any help or encouragement this yields;
thanks for your attention; I hope I explained the situation well enough.
I apologize that it got sort of long.

We have an appointment scheduled for about a week from now, to do the
amputation. I'll keep reading this newsgroup till then. Thanks.