My Furbabies – Peanut
Peanut was another German Shepherd Dog. My husband and I adopted him at the beginning of my 4th year in veterinary school. I found him at a breeder in east Texas while I was on my externship. The breeder was giving him away for free because he supposedly had congenital megaesophagus. (Which he did. We just didn’t find out about it until much later.) He also only weighed 12 pounds at 12 weeks when his littermates were between 25 to 35 pounds. Definitely got ourselves the runt of the litter!
Peanut had a lot of joint problems throughout his life. When he was about 5 months old, Lupa tripped over him while they were running the fence in our backyard which caused a pretty serious injury. His growth plate at the bottom end of his radius on one of his front leg was injured and closed early. This would have caused the other bone in his forearm, the ulna, to start curving with growth. Thankfully I was in vet school, so he had surgery to have this fixed. He was in a splint for months so I got really good at bandaging. After spending all those weeks changing his bandage once to twice per week – had to do it often; he was growing! – I got really sick of bandaging legs. To this day, it’s a task I’ll give to an eager technician so I don’t have to do it myself. 😉 He came out of this with a straight leg, but limped on it for the rest of his life.
As time passed we noted that his gait wasn’t all that great, so after some hip x-rays, we found serious hip dysplasia in our little guy. Since we had no children at the time and could afford it, we had a total hip replacement done on both of his hips. One of them got infected, so he had to have a correction. This didn’t work, so he had a 4th surgery to have the hip implant removed. He ended up with a total hip replacement in one hip and a femoral head ostectomy in the other. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference in between them in our 72 pound GSD. He did great with both!
To add insult to injury, he also developed elbow dysplasia which caused him a lot of problems, and pain, in the front legs. He started eating while lying down which probably kept his megaesophagus from causing him problems. He was basically on some form of pain reliever and joint supplements for most of his life after the age of about 3 years. He was super happy, so we gave the pills, did the bloodwork, and kept him running around with Lupa and my parents’ dogs.
As he came to the last year of his life, he started doing a lot of coughing. After some chest x-rays, I finally confirmed that megaesophagus that he was born with. It did cause him to have some level of aspiration pneumonia throughout the last year of his life. He took a lot of antibiotics and had a lot more bloodwork, but he was happy. After about a year of this, his body finally gave out and we had to let him go when he became ill. He was 10 years and 8 months old, and he was my husbands first dog. We both miss him dearly.
