He was born here, in this room, one very hot summer morning very early morning with my friend MCBeth attending (Vet). I had the windows open it was so hot in the room but I could not run the window a/c unit for fear of chilling the little bratwurst with feet.
Nothing says sausage as much as a newborn Basset.
And then we began to notice that Llewis was having trouble moving around with the others. We were told oh, he'd be fine. But we weren't so sure. This was my first (and only ever) litter so I was depending on others to tell me what to do. Finally, I decided to do something myself and took little Llewis to see the Vet, who thought it looked like a "Swimmer puppy" and it did. So we taped his back legs together in hobbles, and actually, he did better.
But they had to be taped. When the tape came off, he went right back to his hobbedly gimpy tumbly self. Nahh...there was something else going on.
I took him one afternoon to the home of one of my other Vets. This one has horses and is perhaps a bit more attuned to lameness. She watched him "walk" and fall and trip, drag one leg, hoisting it at a funny angle, and when she palated his rear she said she didn't think there was a femur there!
So off we went to the University of Wisconsin, and they poked and prodded and xrayed and palpated and their official diagnosis written in his chart, was that he was "a mess". The femur did not reach the hip socket which was basically not there anyway, and the patella was either so far out of place and misshapen or not there (to be honest I do not remember) that he could not properly bend that back leg at the hock.
If you look at these, you will see the problem. We knew we were going to keep him. I picked his brother Nigel as my future show puppy even tho his shoulders were a bit heavy and his front wide...
Off we went with Llewis to a doggie Re-habilitation place. Not for drugs, but physical re-hab.
There he became a clinic favorite as he ate frozen peanut butter while they did acupuncture and chiropractic, and we had a state of the art brace made which he wore awhile. And after awhile, the re=hab place asked us to have him re-evaluated by an orthopedic specialist because nothing much was happening.
So we called in Dr Lou. We showed him the U of Wisconsin xrays, showed him the puppy, let him do his own exam and at the end he said "Take that brace off of him, take him home and let him run around and be a puppy. He needs to USE those muscles..." and so we did.
He has learned to use his disability to his advantage.
This is one of his favorite toys, a carrot. He has had it for years altho I think Doc has pretty much destroyed it now. He uses just his incisors on toys and kind of gnaws on them.
That silly leg just won't bend and won't do what he wants.
All the boys, back when everyone's legs were working better.
