“Milo is about eight and a half months old now, that means his skeletal growth is pretty close to being complete,” Clary said. “He’s got maybe 5-10 percent more. That’s one of the things we’ve been assessing with periodic radiographs, is to assess his bone growth. So far, his condition has not affected the growth … his limbs are very straight. That was a definite concern on the front end. We felt confident about getting the elbows back, but we couldn’t tell for sure how well the bones were going to grow. Thankfully, he is nice and straight in his bone structure and I don’t expect that to be a problem moving forward.”
Now that it has been some time since the surgery, Hays looked back on Milo’s progress as an emotional roller coaster. She said when Milo’s full-body cast came off, she was given a thick book of things required for the rehabilitation at home and that Milo had no muscle mass. Him being a puppy, he wanted to be able to move as a dog his age is inclined to do.
“It was really difficult … Milo wanted to go from the very second those things came off,” Hays said. “The second he was actually able to move his body, the challenge went from holding him all the time to him only wanting to go. He didn’t have any strength, so as he moved around it caused his legs to move out. It was constantly picking him off the floor and worrying about an additional injury.”
“After spending so much time with Milo – with his casts, we had to carry him everywhere, we literally could not put him down – we had become too attached at the time,” Hays said. “Milo also became an internet sensation, so we had hundreds and hundreds of applications on him, which is not normal for us, so it almost seemed unwise to adopt him out for people who may want him because he was an internet sensation and not because he’s a beautiful coonhound.”