Kaiju is going to have another knee surgery this Friday. This time, it’s the left hind knee. It turned out that the cruciate ligament on the left knee was also damaged when he fell on March 1st. However, it was minor compare to the fracture on the right hind knee that nobody noticed the limp on the left until May 1st, when our surgeon said “oh, he’s limping on the left!” at the final check-up for the right hind knee surgery.

I was in Japan visiting my parents when Paul called me to tell me this awful news. He was only 6 months old. We had thought the little one was done with treatments and only had a full recovery to look forward to. Instead, now, we’d have to go through another round of heartaches and worries. We both were so mad, during that phone call. So mad at things that happened months ago that we couldn’t go back and change. It was terrible.

The procedure involves the growth plate, and for various reasons given to us by the hospital, we decided to wait until the growth plate was ready and sealed. The surgeon recommended that, if we were to wait, we should wait for at least 6 weeks. It will have been 10 weeks this Friday.

We are generally happy about our decision. Although we have not allowed visits to dog parks, roughhousing, steps, and strenuous exercises (we constantly monitor his limping to make sure it is not worse), those 2+ months have given us the chance to let him be a puppy again to some extent, and to let us have fun and connect with him in the ways we couldn’t for two previous months. We also have tried to socialize him the best we can. If we had chosen to go into the surgery #2 right then on May 1st, he would have spent 4 consecutive months (or more) inactive. We feel that it could have impacted his social skills too negatively, considering he was only 4 months old when it all began.

We truly hope he has not been in too much pain for the past 10 weeks. I hope everything will get fixed up this time, and he can go back to being fully active by fall, and for many many years after that. And I hope we will be the best dog owners to help him recover for the next 8 weeks. We have done it once already, so we can do it again.

a very quiet summer ahead for this one