My friend’s beagle was 6 years old when she became paralyzed in the back legs one day. Turns out that she had 2 herniated disks.
Her regular vet suggested putting her down, but I convinced my friend to take her to a specialty medical clinic that is known for being a state of the art facility, for a consult. We took her there the next day and the vets there said they could operate on her and she’d have a 95% chance of being able to walk again. The vets who performed the surgery, only do that particular orthopedic type of surgery (on dogs) that’s all they do. All of the vets there have specialties, so these vets had done this particular type of surgery hundreds of times with great success. Unfortunately the surgery was in the close to $5,000 range. My friend couldn’t imagine not getting the surgery, especially for such a young dog.
They scheduled the surgery for the next day. The beagle was in over night and then they sent her home. She had to be “walked” with the aid of a sling that went under her belly and back legs for about 5 days, then miraculously, she could walk, albeit with a bit of a drunken swagger, which lasted about 4 months. Now she’s pretty much back to normal, with only a little bit of a hip swivel kind of walk. She’s now 8 years old and the happiest dog I know. She’s one of the group of dogs that I regularly take care of and is often a house guest at my house.
We ended up having a huge garage sale with my friend’s stuff, stuff from my house and all of my friends and neighbors who donated items. It only made a small dent in the total cost of the surgery, but my friend said it was worth it. The vet clinic was able to set them up on some type of credit payment plan, which they chose to do.
The vets said in the case that they were not able to fix the beagle to be able to walk, they said that she could live out a pretty comfortable life with the use of a back end cart. We researched that quite a bit and that was what my friend was prepared to do in case the surgery failed. In the meantime, I met several people who had dogs with back end carts and they seemed to be faring pretty well and seemed like regular happy dogs. Unlike people, they seem to adapt to that kind of adversity pretty easily.