hester said
Corbie is a beautiful, cheeky lad!  Love the photos and the vid.

Curious about what you said about a vet mentioning nerve tumor and whether that has been ruled out - is there a pain response somewhere with pressure?  I know the MRI was mentioned and it is a very expensive procedure, but can be fairly definitive.  I ask because that is my dog's cancer and he was intermittently lame with other "red herring" issues that were assumed to be the source of pain and the reason he eventually stopped all weight bearing on the leg.  So we found his nerve sheath tumor very late and a normally slow growing tumor became very aggressive and large and metastasized to a local lymph node.  I am NOT trying to scare you - I have struggled for days with saying anything at all.

He does look so happy!!  

That's ok, I don't mind you mentioning it and sorry to hear your dog has that cancer 🙁  It was just one of the options the orthopaedic surgeon mentioned, as he had no idea why Corbie wouldn't use the leg, after giving him thorough examinations and xrays.  

He had definitely torn the cruciate ligament when he slipped, just as he was healing from his initial injury and his limp had almost gone. Surgery revealed ligament was 10% torn, so not a huge amount but enough to be painful for him.  We were about to start trying to get him into hydrotherapy before that happened.

The surgeon also said many people choose not to MRI and, if we did, they probably wouldn't be able to do anything anyway  We both decided not to put him through any more procedures/surgeries - if the initial TPLO had failed we would've done it at the time, but it was all ok, I was shown all the xrays and saw the plate and screws all in place.