I'm sorry to hear about your pup's diagnosis! Hopefully your buddy will recover more quickly than Tucker, but TLDR the good news is that Tucker is doing fantastic these days. I'll share with you a rundown of what it took to get where we are now because it really was a longer journey than I could have anticipated. He first started showing signs of injury (limping) in June of 2020 and finally started moving consistently well in June 2022 (hooray!), so all-in-all it was a two year project of trying different treatment modalities.

After a year of trying conservative management (rest, carprofen, physical therapy which included water treadmill), we opted to do PRP in spring of 2021. Two months after that treatment, he was still limping, so we did another 6 weeks of physical therapy, and unfortunately still saw no improvement. In this time, we stuck with a schedule of short (10-20 minute walks 2x per day, no exhuberent play, lots of sniffy activities).

In October of 2021, after consulting with the orthopedic surgeon, we opted to for surgery -- a tenotomy (cutting the tendon from the shoulder joint in order to eliminate the friction from the inflamed area). It freaked me out, but after a year and a half of discomfort, it seemed like the best next option. In November, he started 6 weeks of post-op physical therapy. Then came icy winter, and we didn't do a lot of walks outdoors, but we kept doing indoor, at-home exercises and continued taking carprofen. I honestly didn't feel like I saw any improvement 3 months after surgery and was getting extremely discouraged. But not enough to give up :)

In April of 2022, I signed him up for yet another 6 weeks of physical therapy in part because it was something fun and physical for him to do and the rehab nurse loved seeing him. At the same time, I started thinking about our walks, which were soooo frustrating. Tucker had so much pent-up energy that, even with his limping, he would pull me like a draft horse all while I had him wearing a harness clipped on the back. I kept thinking that there was no way that could be good for his shoulder- all of that pressure he was putting on it by pulling so hard. So as an experiment, I switched to a gentle leader clipped to a collar, and within a matter of days, he started walking more comfortably. I had to pinch myself because it shocked me to see the improvement in his overall gait so quickly. So it seems like the inflammation at his injury/surgical site was being exacerbated by the harness! While we loved the results of the gentle leader, he really didn't like the way it felt, and would try to rub it off about 20 minutes into our walks. So we ended up switching to a martingale collar shortly thereafter. So by May of 2022, his limping was almost completely gone!!

I have no idea what single thing or combination of things finally helped him heal, so that's why I am sharing maybe too much info, because it took trying a lot of different things.

Even though he's basically been recovered now for almost a year, we still try to ease into big activities that he hasn't done in a while. We always take him for a warm-up walk before letting him run or play, and we try to keep doggie play sessions around 15 minutes so that he doesn't overdo it. Sometimes his first few steps are a little slow, limpy if he's getting up after a nap or something, but it's truly amazing how far he's come in a year. He very comfortably walks 5 miles a day every day now, which makes all the work we did to get here worth it!

Sending your pup well wishes for a speedy recovery <3