We did everything we could to save sweet DOZER'S leg. After months of rehab and therapy, the leg became nothing but a problem for our dear boy. His quit using the leg to walk with and soon didn't even use it to balance with. The wrist they we worked so hard to beep from turning under refused to go back in the correct position. The shoulder of the leg had been pulled apart from his injury. Because of his size, we could not keep the shoulder in place. The good news is that the shoulder did begin to scar over enough to keep it from coming out all the way. The bad news is that he developed more nerve paralysis and he had begun the process of trying to remove his own leg. i always say, if you wait long enough, the animal will eventually tell what he or she wants to have happen. Once that process begins, the leg has to be removed immediately or one morning you wake up and find an animal as large or Dozer has chewed his foot off during the middle of the night and has bled to death by morning. He let us know the limb had to go and we got him to our Surgical Specialist in Charleston to have the procedure done yesterday. Removing a dogs limb is only as difficult as the size of the dog. The bigger the dog, the more complicated the procedure. Dozer's surgery took close to four hours. Each blood vessel had to be tied off instead of being cauterized because of his size. It was a long, meticulous surgery to get the best possible outcome for our boy. On a small dog you can get away with removing a lot of the muscle around the shoulder area. With a large dog, you take that muscle mass from the leg and shoulder and use it to close the shoulder with. It gives him back the padding he once had and also gives him more body support on his upper body. As you can see from the video we have posted on his web page, after a night of heavy pain meds, he was able to get up and walk on three legs. He got tired but that is more from the drugs and surgery as a whole. Dozer is going to be great as a tripod. He has already been adopted and will go back to his new home once his rehab has begun and we get him to a place where he can comfortably walk. Dozer's Amputation surgery was long and complicated. On top of that he will have rehab. We need for everyone to please donate as much as you can to help us with this big bill for this Giant dog. I always go above and beyond before I ever remove a limb on a large animal. Mastiff's are like a horse in that sense. You never see tripod horses. Dozer proved us wrong and knew what he needed to do to survive this. He prepared his body to be a tripod so we could remove the limb. He is now free of the extra weight he had been dragging around can relax and be a normal dog.
