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Tui’s knee surgery

It has been nearly 6 weeks since the last blog post, and a lot has happened during that time. Tui’s knee surgery to repair his torn ‘cruciate’ ligament went well, and he has been on the journey to recovery since then.

Recovery from this particular canine knee surgery requires a very gradual increase in exercise from week to week, starting with strict leash only visits to the toilet, to strict leash only walking for set times per day, increasing in frequency and length over the period of several weeks. This allows the wound to heal, as well as for the knee to gain full function again. Ben, my brother, has done an excellent job at managing Tui’s recovery over the last month and a bit. Tui has come from barely putting weight on the affected leg, and having a very restrictive exercise regime, to running around the yard again with nearly full function of the leg.

The Heyrex monitor has been a fantastic tool to be able to see just how much (or little) exercise Tui has actually been doing. Directly after his surgery, Tui was primarily just lying around and resting, only being allowed outside on a leash to go to the toilet. After around 5 days of this, short leash walks started, after a couple of weeks of this, the exercise increased in quantity and frequency, and again week by week since then.

To show you just how well the Heyrex monitor has picked up these changes, here is a summary of the data from 5 days after surgery, 2.5 weeks after surgery and 5 weeks after surgery showing the amount of activity Tui has been doing each day including resting, light activity (very slow walking) and vigorous activity (walking and running):

You can see the gradual increase in activity between each time period. At 5 days after the surgery, Tui was primarily resting (around 2/3 of the day), with short amounts of time walking around (likely getting comfortable on his bed) and going to the toilet. After 2.5 weeks, Tui was able to be walked properly on a leash for a set amount of time, he was also sleeping and resting less (likely as a result of feeling better with less pain, and more ability to put weight on the leg). At the 5 week mark, you can see Tui really is getting more in to walking and running, after having time to recovery and to allow the knee to heal such that he has nearly returned to fully weight bearing on the affected leg.

It is great to hear about Tui’s recovery from my brother, but even better to see it for myself from Tui’s Heyrex data.

Choco can be happy this his Heyrex monitor is in very good hands with Tui. Next month we will see how Tui’s sleep patterns were affected by the surgery.

Until next time,

Mark & Tui

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