border collie has dislocated his leg...

[smokey]

Apologies then I must have skimmed read this earlier and missed that it had already been replaced and its failed to stay put. That does change things. Apologies Op I should have read more carefully.

The issue is the chances of being able to return a dislocation into the joint once its been out a certain amount of time reduce's. When the hip joint capsule is left empty,without the head of the femur filling it, it often fills with residues,byproducts and blood from the damaged cells around it meaning it isn't always an empty hole to just slot the bone back into if its left dislocated. The longer its left the less likely it is that the bone can go back in with manipulation alone.

However its a catch 22. If the hip has no structural support, in the form of soft tissue and muscle, in place to hold the bone in place,then even if the joint capsule is still empty, and with the special sling bandaging in place, it may continue to dislocate because theres no external support holding it in, the inner ligament that connects the bone to the pelvis has already snapped before or when it originally dilocated. So its another g.a that may have the same result as the first.

So giving a few days to allow some of this traumatised tissue to heal and hoping for the best does make sense if its already failed to hold once shortly after the initial trauma.
Plus if it wont hold in the socket at all and you need to take off the head of the femor at least some of the area will already be repairing to provide support for the leg.

I don't think the groomer can necessarily be blamed to be honest or at least it sounds unlikely to be due to a serious incident there.
She mentioned the lameness casually on pick up and didn't try any deception by the sounds of things and at the time you were able pick up the leg and check it...generally they don't like you doing that when its freshly dislocated, unless they are a very stoic animal, as its quite painful.

Although dislocated hips are most commonly seen with hit by car trauma, sometimes they do also happen in the strangest of presentations..on the way back from the walk,after a misstep coming up or down stairs,in a fall etc.
It rarely occurs in a jump as the front feet take most of the impact...but a misstep on the stairs seems to be a big one...however most of those dogs turned out to have slightly abnormal hips which is why they luxate relatively easily once the internal ligaments damaged..Did you vet mention if the sockets look normal on x-rays? If theres a shallow socket present, once the little inner ligament tying the top of the femur into the hip socket is damaged its not that difficult to pop a hip and it can be tricky to make them stay put.

If you own dogs this is sadly one of those cases where somethings bad things happen at the worse times imaginable!

Poor boy though! hopefully he will be one of the lucky ones that just decided to go back in and stay put though.
Worse case scenario the FHO has a pretty good success rate for getting dogs back to their normal function. its amazing how well dogs cope with these things sometimes.

Thank you Aru for taking time to post this. Excellent explanation, and I think it covers all outcomes. This is exactly how the vet put it to me, but your explanation re the empty capsule made perfect sense. Don't think the sockets are particularly shallow, he has never had an issue before, so we are crossing everything and hoping for a positive, op free outcome.

 

[PucciNPoni]

In answer to this, and the poster above, I have spoken to the griomer, and she has said that she noticed he was holding himself 'a bit funny' when he got out of her car, before he was ever even on the premises. I'm going to assume that he hurt himself getting in or out of the car, or with his lead on his morning walk, and that injury then led to the dislocation.

All sounds like very bad luck for all concerned.

I do hope your dog comes through all this soundly and quickly.

 

[smokey]

Another quick update- have spoken again to the vet today. She is happy that he is pain free, comfortable and resting. Encouraged that he is now taking tentative steps on all four legs ( 2 or 3 then a few hops) she wants to keep him on pain relief until early next week, then have him in to be seen by the orthopaedic surgeon. Plan is if possible to re locate the joint, and if that fails to go ahead with femoral joint removal.
He is banned from stairs and being kept away from the cats.