CHICAGO – For a good half-hour, Dasty did the slobbery, happy dog thing – chomping on a hard rubber toy, offering it to visitors, chasing it when it was thrown. Hard to believe that just a few months ago, this 5-year-old German shepherd was virtually crippled by severe arthritis in his left rear leg.
“His quality of life was not good,” says Dr. Cheryl Adams, a veterinarian at Arboretum View Animal Hospital in Downers Grove, Ill. “The poor guy could barely stand up.”
Now he’s as good as new, thanks to stem cell treatment, a relatively new procedure in which Dasty’s own fat cells provided the stem cells that were injected into the leg. It got him up and running again. And mobility is a prerequisite for Dasty’s job. He’s a member of the Chicago Police Department’s narcotics unit.
Turns out, his arthritis was caused by Lyme disease.
“We don’t know where he contracted it,” says Officer Marion Anderson, a 21-year Chicago Police Department veteran who has been Dasty’s partner for 4 1/2 years. “He had been working for a couple of years, and one day I noticed he was getting up a little slow. Then it got slower. And he started limping.”