Grizzy the mastiff suddenly became lame just before Easter in 2016, and the odds were more or less stacked against him: The veterinarians had seen these kinds of cases before and suggested his family have him put to sleep to spare him any more suffering.
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The 160-lb. mastiff had Wobbler’s Disease, a disease of the cervical spine that’s common in large-breed dogs. He couldn’t even walk, much less jump and play around with his best friend, 5-year-old Luke. Instead, he just had to lie there and be content listening to his boy reading out loud…
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Melissa Mullamphy and her family refused to give up, however, and arranged for him to undergo surgery. But it didn’t go at all like they expected, and instead of walking out, he was rolled out to the waiting room in a gurney. If he wasn’t walking in four months, the veterinarians told them, he probably never would.
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The family did everything they could to get their big guy walking again, but nothing worked. When that four-month mark approached and they still hadn’t seen any progress, they brought him to Shaker Veterinary Hospital in Latham, New York. Veterinary technician Jenn Wolfe said it was “probably the biggest case that we’ve ever taken on.â€
“He was paralyzed. Not able to do much but lay on his side. As far as sitting, standing, getting up, he couldn’t do it,” she added.
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Not in the beginning, at least. Slowly but surely, Grizzy started making gains, fueled by his strong determination and special bond with his best boy!
He wanted all the attention. So if he was in the rehab room and Jen and Kelly were not paying attention to him when they were in other treatment rooms, he wanted to know where they were. So I think that was another way Grizzy decided to help himself, because if he couldn’t get his head up above the door to see what was going on, then he was unhappy.
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They would actually watch him looking around, getting annoyed, whining and then just trying, trying, trying until finally he would get himself up.
Sure enough, nine months after he was first diagnosed with Wobbler’s, just a couple days before Christmas, good ol’ Grizzy started walking again! “When he saw us, he actually almost ran to the car. We were all crying,”Melissa recalled.
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Once he got the momentum to get up on his legs, there was kinda no stopping him… He defied all the odds and my son got his best friend back.
Grizzy and Luke star in Melissa’s illustrated children’s book, “Me, My Dog, and a Sheep,”which was published in 2017. As Grizzy begins his long road to recovery, his family is behind him every step of the way, showing that love and perseverance are “the most important medicine of all.â€
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Watch Grizzy go from a quadriplegic to sprinting after his boy in the video below.
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