I was recently faced with an all too common and tragic scenario; a dachshund dog that had suddenly lost the use of its back legs. The dog had gone from being slightly wobbly on its hindquarters to being paralysed and unable to feel its back feet over a period of only 24 hours.

This was an emergency situation and a CT scan confirmed that an intervertebral disc had prolapsed and was compressing the dog’s spinal cord. The chance of recovery for this dog without surgery was only 10%.
Intervertebral disc disease can occur in any dog breed but some, like the characterful dachshund, are more prone than others. As many as 25% of dachshunds will suffer from disc disease in their lifetime – 20% of those will likely require surgery.

The inter-vertebral disc is the cushion between the bones of the backbone. It has a firm outer layer and a soft inner layer. What happens in the dachshund is that the outer layer becomes calcified (hardened) and brittle, and allows the soft inner part of the disc to burst through and squash the sensitive nervous tissue in the spinal column.

A highly delicate procedure

The challenge with surgery is getting access to the damaged area to remove the prolapsed disc material to decompress the spinal cord. Essentially, the spinal cord is encased within the centre of the bones of the spinal column (the vertebrae). The only way to operate on a prolapsed disc is to use a high-speed orthopaedic burr to very carefully drill away the bone on the side of the vertebrae until the spinal cord is reached.

It is a highly delicate procedure and one slip of the burr would cause irreversible damage. These are highly stressful and risky operations and I always feel a great sense of trepidation when I have to tackle this difficult procedure. In this case I was confident that I hadn’t caused any damage when I reached the point where the spinal cord was exposed, and it was a relief to discover that there was a large amount of disc material that I could carefully remove.

Within 48 hours the dog was able to weight bear with only a little assistance, and was trying to walk within three days. It often takes many weeks for a dog to fully recover from a serious disc prolapse but, in this case, I am hopeful my patient will go on to make a good recovery.