Almost a year after she was found dying and with mostly severed legs in a forest in southwestern Russia, stray dog Monika can walk again.
A vet in Novosibirsk, Siberia, 4,000 kilometers northeast of where the bitch was discovered, fitted her with four prosthetics. They are made with a 3D printer. “Luck and experience played a major role,” Sergey Gorchkov said modestly to the AFP news agency on Friday.
The 33-year-old Russian has already given 37 ‘patients’ artificial limbs since 2015 and performed a quadruple transplant in a cat in 2019. Now he did that for the first time with a dog. After a minor setback – one of the prostheses broke during the fixation, causing a two-month delay – Gorchkov was able to successfully complete the operation two weeks ago.
Workers found the two-to-four-year-old female more dead than alive in a forest near Plastunovskaya near Krasnodar in December last year. They alerted a volunteer who provided first aid to the animal. “She was in terrible shape. The four stumps were gaping and bloody wounds.” While bandaging them, Alla Leonkina recalled the Siberian vet Gorchkov. He made the news with the quadruple transplant in a cat at his clinic, the “best” in Novosibirsk.
She immediately saw herself faced with a problem: how to bridge the distance of 4000 kilometers. A crowdfunding campaign turned out to be the solution. In a month’s time, the public funding yielded more than 400,000 rubles (about 4,800 euros). The money could not only be used to pay for a plane ticket, but also for printing the prostheses, the complex and expensive operation and the accommodation costs. ,,With her sitting in the passenger seat next to me, we flew to Novosibirsk”, Monika’s savior angel says looking back.
According to the vet, everything is fine with the bitch and she can start her new life. ,,Monika’s bones will grow again and adapt naturally to the prostheses. They will become like antlers on a deer’s head.”
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