Cellulits in dogs

Pet-Village

:PHi All,
I'm not sure if you have all heard of a rare flesh eating bacteria called cellultitis, to be honest we had never really heard about it but we;ve had the unfortunate experience or should i say our beloved boy has, and it is terrible.
We booked our boxer boy 19months old in for a (as far as we were told)a routine castration which we thought would be best for him, everything went fine and we picked him up and we then took him back to the vet three days later for a post op check up and an injection of antibiotics. Three weeks after the operation, i took him to the park on the morning for a run and all seemed fine, brought him home and he went to sleep. Around 4pm on the afternoon he woke up but couldnt get up on his feet, i automatically assumed he had pulled a muscle in his leg as some of you may know boxers love to run like a bat out of hell. I called him and managed to get him on his feet but then thats all he did he just stood there, was looking straight through me, and like he was drugged, he then stood like this for hours, i could not get him to sit down although he was swaying to and fro. We then thought he had been poisoned, his body had gone freezing cold and his gums were white. We examined him and felt a swelling in his groin and it was spreading rapidly down his leg, so off we rushed to the vets. They told us they were 99.9% sure he had a hernia and that they would have to open him up, so we agreed because our boy was in a great deal of pain. We then got a phone call saying that he did not have an hernia (bear in mind he had already been operated on three weeks prior to this), he had cellulitis, now we had never heard of it. The vet told us they could not understand how our boy had contracted it they were stumped and we didnt know what to say because we had not heard of it. They told us they had dosed him with high strength antibiotics and pain killers, well we were so upset. I quickly jumped onto the www and looked it up, i found out it is what some people get when they have had plastic surgery, bacteria sets in under the skin and starts eating the flesh away and it is quite fatal. There are a couple of other ways you can contract it but we pin pointed ours down to the castration surgery but our vet said it was highly unlikely that he had caught it from that, But it was in the area of the castration wound. I rang the kennels where we purchased our boxer girl from and asked them if they had heard of it, they never had in around the 30 years they had been breeding boxers. We did not know that animals could get it too. I even spoke with my GP about it and he said the vet was lying to us as they know darned well where it came from, it was bacteria entering our boy whilst he was in for his castration. Now the worst thing was our boy was on steroids at the time as we had been given them by the vet for another condition, and so steroids lower the immune system which means the body cannot fight infection nearly half as good as normal, so it was quite a serious time for a while, we honestly did not think he would make it, it has taken him a long time to get better but im glad to say he is much better, also the shock of the ops and infection caused his fur to start falling out dramatically but we are getting it back to a nice shine now with loads of evening primrose oil. We decided to go down the herbal route we give him dorwest garlic and fenugreek, dorwest keepers mix and easy green, and he is doing so well we are overjoyed. Just thought you should know to make sure that if you have to have any surgery done on your lovely pets make sure they cleanse everything down properly, i didnt want to frighten anybody writing this post it is just that we thought you should be aware of it, like most people we had never had heard of this awful bug, if we had of id have made sure i'd notify my vet my concerns about the hygiene. Oh yeah the vets charged us for all the treatment too tut tut.....