A New Beginning

The day went very well as I said earlier. I can see the biggest problem is going to be trying to convince Tris that he needs to stay calm and take it easy for a while. He is sitting here whinning at me as I type to let him out.

You can see from the picture that as soon as the sedation wore off he was able to stand on his own just as well as before. I have put a harness on him to help with carrying him down the steps to the outside. Part of the rehabilitation is that he don`t do stairs for several days and allow the joints to heal as much as possible before putting them through that motion.

With the 2 vials of fat that we sent Vet-Stem, they were able to extract enough stem cells to supply us with 4 injections for today and one to save banked for future use. The procedure today required sedation, which may or may not be required in all cases you would have to check with each individual vet...(not sure if it is just because of Tristan`s people skills or not) Each joint was shaved, in his case both knees and his left elbow to prevent any contamination, the needles were then inserted into the joint capsule and the stem cells inplanted. The 4th shot was given intraveneously to help the body as a whole.

The rehab is very similar to that of a knee replacemnet if I recall. He is not to do any running, jumping or playing at all for 4-6 weeks. We will be doing passive range of motion execises each day followed by ice packs at first and slow-short leash walks. Everything is to be done on leash. The full rehab instructions can be found on the vet-stem website at http://www.vet-stem.com/images/VetRehab.pdf and http://www.vet-stem.com/images/PetOwnerRehab.pdf

We will take it from here and see how well it goes, I will post each day with updates.