Ellie loves to play hard — really hard. Probably too hard. One of her favorite activities was for us to kick a soccer ball so she could chase it and crash into it, practically rolling herself over it until both came to a stop. She would want to do this over and over again for as long as we’d let her.

Ellie’s other main source of relieving her pent-up youthful lab energy was to get what is often referred to as the “zoomies” either in the yard or even in the house. You could see it in her eyes when she just couldn’t contain her excitement anymore and just had to explode by running at top speed, in loops, until she calmed down. The look on her face was priceless because you could tell she was enjoying herself to the max.

We learned the hard way, unfortunately, that both of these behaviors could very well lead to a common injury in dogs (especially certain breeds, including Labrador Retrievers) called cranial cruciate ligament disease. It’s essentially the human equivalent of a torn ACL. Painful, uncomfortable, often debilitating.

I won’t get into the details or physiology of a dog’s anatomy, but essentially a cruciate ligament rupture/tear results from the degeneration of the ligament, usually from repeated trauma to the knee area, which is called the stifle in dogs. One specific, traumatic event can also cause a dog’s knee to become damaged.

Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly what caused Ellie’s injury, but knowing Ellie, it could have been a combination of things. There was no one, outlying event we could pinpoint the injury to, but she started limping intermittently on her right hind leg in April. It wasn’t a constant limp, but it was most notable later in the day at first, once she had begun to settle down before bedtime. I think the physical stress of the day’s activities caught up with her and she felt it mostly at night. We monitored this for about two weeks before deciding to bring her to the vet to get x-rays because she wasn’t improving. It didn’t seem to bother her, so we didn’t see an immediate cause for alarm. We tried to limit her activity as much as possible, which is extremely difficult with a 2-year-old lab.

The radiograph report from the x-rays came back with a few conclusions:

1. There is moderate effusion and mild arthritis of the right stifle. Differentials include a ligamentous injury (such as a partial cranial cruciate ligament injury), a meniscal injury or other stifle injury.

2. There is very mild effusion without arthritis of the left stifle.

3. There is mild muscle atrophy of the right hind limb.

4. Unremarkable pelvis and coxofemoral joints.

If you think this report seems a bit hard to follow, you’re not alone. What we learned later by researching (not from anything the vet said) is that ligaments don’t show up on x-rays, so there’s no way of knowing for sure what the extent of the ligament injury is. The x-rays only rule out other factors, like broken bones or other inconsistencies. What we do know is that Ellie’s symptoms are consistent with a cruciate ligament injury.

Making matters worse was that this injury happened during the height of the coronavirus shutdown, so vets weren’t accepting dog owners inside the building. This made it more difficult to ask questions and really get the vet’s ear because we didn’t have the luxury of speaking to the doctor face-to-face. She did call us personally to deliver Ellie’s diagnosis, but it was too much to process over the phone. She was spewing out all these medical terms that I had never heard before, so much of it was lost on me. I couldn’t even think of the right follow-up questions to ask in that moment. All I really remember her saying is that she was referring us to a surgeon and that she really didn’t need to see Ellie for a follow-up. She told us to give Ellie the pain reliever as directed and to just limit her activity. This did feel a bit like she was brushing us off and not really providing much help, but don’t rush to criticize this doctor just yet.

Thank God for Google because what I learned in the coming weeks was imperative to Ellie’s recovery and to my own mental health!