May 3, 2010
Going out on a limb

By Billy Watkins
The Clarion-Ledger

Read this story in The Clarion-Ledger.

Best anyone can figure, the dog was caught in a beaver trap and over a period of days had to gnaw off his back legs to escape.

Catherine Lutz, a brigadier general in the Mississippi National Guard, found him in the middle of Cox Ferry Road in Flora on Sept. 19, 2009.

"I stopped, rolled down the window and said, 'Boy, this is not the safest place for you to be resting,' " she recalls. "Then I noticed he was bleeding ... and then I noticed his back legs were gone.

"So I got out and walked toward him. He was very friendly, wagging his tail. I picked him up and put him in my vehicle."

Seven months later, the dog known as Bipod - a coal black mix of German shepherd and Labrador - can walk and run, even swim.

He is the first, and hospital officials emphasize the last, canine to receive a prosthesis from Methodist Rehabilitation Center in Jackson.

"It was special circumstances that I just couldn't walk away from," says Jennifer Long, the clinical manager of Methodist Rehab's Lakeland office who's also certified in orthotics and prosthetics. "Our mission statement says we are dedicated to the restoration of lives. And with Bipod, he just seemed like another life to serve.

"I talked with my boss and asked if it would be OK if I did this on my own time, and was granted permission to do it. Every time I see that dog now, I'm so glad I work for compassionate people."

Lutz is one half of a Mississippi military power couple. Her husband, Bill, is the retired assistant adjutant general for the Mississippi Air National Guard and a Vietnam veteran.

But both are softies when it comes to dogs.

In January 2008, Bill Lutz found a stray Golden Retriever - also on Cox Ferry Road - that was old and deaf and crippled with arthritis.

"We kept him, buffed him up, and he was a good dog who lived about a year and a half," he says. "When we had to put him down, I sat in my car for 15 minutes and cried."

They have taken in others. But one look at Bipod, about a year old at the time, and "I knew we had a long road ahead," he says.

He phoned Clare Sanders, a 2000 graduate of Mississippi State's College of Veterinary Medicine and one of a handful of certified canine rehabilitation therapists in the state.

"A majority of the dogs I see are older dogs that have back issues, knee injuries or are paralyzed," Sanders says. "I'd never taken on anything like this.

"He really didn't know anything was wrong with him. He was walking on his front legs the best he could, and was also using the stumps that were left on his back legs. That is the good and the bad thing about dogs. They don't get caught up in the mental aspect of an injury. But the stumps were getting infected, and that was a major issue."

Her first inclination was to fit Bipod with a canine wheelchair, a contraption that resembles a cart.

"But there is a strap that has to go across his back," Sanders says, "and when we tried that, he panicked. I guess it resembled the trap he got caught in, and he wanted nothing to do with it."

The stump on Bipod's left leg is only a half-inch below the knee. But the stump on the right is two inches below the knee - enough, Sanders figured, to support a prosthesis. With not much to go by except her imagination, she made Bipod a plastic artificial leg. "But it was too heavy, too cumbersome."

All the while, Bipod's stumps were getting more infected. Options and time were running out.

A friend intervened. "One of my clients works in the MRI department at Methodist Rehab, and she knew Jennifer Long," Sanders says. "So she called her and told her about Bipod."

"Growing up, I'd always thought maybe I wanted to be a veterinarian," Long says, "so it had always been a goal of mine to work on a dog.

"And when I saw Bipod for the first time, with Bill Lutz having to carry him, I knew I had made the right decision."

Sanders was there for the first session, too. "Clare sedated him and I was able to make plaster impressions of what was left of both legs," Long says. "Then we used very, very basic prosthetic techniques. It's really more like a sleeve."

A week later, the prosthesis was attached. So were plastic caps to cover the stumps.

"He did far better than we thought," Long says. "I compare it to a child getting one, they just get up and go. And Bipod walked out that day."

Long has had to make him several more prostheses. "He's eaten several of them," Bill Lutz says. "He's a dog, so he loves to chew. But he's getting better about it. He'll even take it off now upon command."

And after a swim with three other dogs in the Lutz's eight-acre lake, Bipod will stroll over to Bill and sit. "He wants me to take off the prosthesis and pour out the water so he can run with the others," Bill Lutz says. "Did I fail to mention that he is really smart?"

Something bigger than Bipod getting a prosthesis could come from this. "Our hope is that Clare will take this niche and run with it," Bill Lutz says.
"I definitely think she can do it," Long says.

Sanders, who works part time at Animal Medical Center in Jackson in addition to her business MS K9 Rehab and Sports Medicine, is tinkering with the idea.

And the canine prosthesis field is wide open. It is believed OrthoPets in Denver is the nation's only company fully devoted to canine or other animal prostheses. Sanders has consulted with OrthoPets on other cases.
Founded in 2003 by the husband and wife team of Martin and Amy Kaufmann, OrhtoPets has clients from across the U.S. and distribution centers near Bath, England, and in Melbourne, Australia.

Martin Kaufmann studied orthotics and prosthetics at Century College in White Bear Lake, Minn., then took mechanical engineering courses for three years.

"I grew up on a farm and loved animals," he says. "I don't care for the big business of medical insurance and how it restricts medical access. I didn't care for having to find an insurance code for every single thing we did so that it would be billed properly.

"I was always fitting people with braces for their knees or ankles, and they would ask me if I could do the same thing for their ailing pet. That's when I first saw canines as viable patients. We could set a reasonable price - $600 or $700 - for an animal prosthesis instead of $6,000 to $7,000 for a human, and not have to fool with the whole insurance thing."

The Kaufmanns only see about 10 percent of their patients in person. "Vets across the country will send me photographs, and often we'll do a (video) conferences on Skype or iChat," he says. "The vet will make a plastic mold of the animal's leg, ship it to us and we'll send them back the device needed."

OrthoPets made national news in 2008 when it fitted Andre, a two-legged dog from Alaska, with two prostheses. "It was about the time (former Alaska governor) Sarah Palin was running for vice president," Kaufmann says, "and Andre received more coverage up here than she did."

Bipod isn't a national celebrity yet, but he's special to those who know him.
"We call him a lot of things -Bipod, BP, Viper," Catherine Lutz says. "But lately he's picked up another name that seems fitting. Champ."