R will get a "new elbow"!

R's elbow surgery is scheduled, and we've been given the green light to go ahead with it despite some other health issues with R.

As many of you know, finding a surgeon and scheduling the procedure has taken a long time (since early January) and lots of work. The reason is that R is having a relatively new surgery ("CUE") for late-stage congenital elbow dysplasia, and not many surgeons are experienced with it. After tons of searching, we finally found a great surgeon who was willing to fly here to lead R's surgery on 4/15.

We had a recent scare that we worried might delay the surgery. R's liver enzymes have been somewhat high and inching upward over the past few months. They continued to go up even after we cut his Rimadyl dose in half. Earlier this week, he had an abdominal ultrasound to make sure that his liver looked okay overall, and it did. We got the "green light" last evening to go forward with the surgery.

The hope is that his liver will return to normal when he doesn't need drugs to control his elbow pain. The surgery can be thought of as giving R a "new elbow" because he'll have artificial surfaces installed for weight-bearing within the elbow. He'll no longer have bones grinding against each other like he has now so we hope that his elbow pain will be greatly reduced or even eliminated.

It's a fairly long recovery so we let him run and have fun in the desert (within reason). He now has 2 weeks until the surgery... and then I hope it's smooth sailing during his recovery!

Thanks for all of the amazing support and offers of help while I was so frustrated by the process of getting his surgery scheduled. Now, I'm starting to feel nervous about the surgery, having cleared all the hurdles to schedule it. That's inevitable, I think!