Help Sushi Walk Again: Urgent Surgery Funds

Hello, for those who don’t know us our names are Gianna Rubino and Brandon Martinez. Our story began off of our love of french bulldogs and finding other similarities that we had in common with each other. Gianna grew up with French bulldogs with her family and while her boyfriend Brandon always breed them for his families and friends to enjoy. Our relationship grew over our love for this breed, our instant connect and love for our families. The connection our four family dogs have with our son Benjamin is remarkable. It’s our excitement as a family when we first wake up with them, to play toys with, cuddle with and laugh at there farts. They always have us smiling and laughing together while we have fun with them. The love, joy, and personalities our four dogs Luna, Coco, Cali, and Sushi bring to our lives is unreal. Brandon and I have had different breeds of dogs but have never had a bond or love so strong other then with our frenchies.

As we’ve known that French bulldogs can be a high maintenance breed and come with some unforeseen medical issues we’ve never seen anything but an allergy here or there in over the 10 years experience with them. However, we didn’t foresee or thought what could possibly happen to one of our own. Our beautiful little girl Sushi you see at the top of our page became unable to walk and move her back legs early evening of last night. We thought she just had a long day playing with our other dogs until we saw her legs dragging across the floor. The dragging and her not regaining her strength became incredibly alarming. We contacted our vet and headed to the Veterinary Emergency Group in Commack. As we drove her there she seemed to get worse with her breathing and expressing pain. When we arrived the vet calmed her down with pain medicine and examined her. During this examine- they were able to see she had some neurological problems that were causing her pain and inability to move her back legs. At this point they started to mention a disease called IVDD which means Intervertebral Disc Disease. This is a disease where there discs are herniated and compressing against the spinal cord. IVDD can just be caused by horseplay, walking down the stairs the wrong way or just simply happen on its own. At this point the vet advise us that our best option would be to go to a veterinary hospital who has a neurological specialist who can perform an MRI and confirm this diagnosis and perform surgery as soon as possible. The vet said during the examine even though Sushi couldn’t move her legs- her toes and feet were responding to her squeezing them which meant she could have a 90% chance at walking again. However there are risks to putting any dog under but especially a frenchie with their small breathing airways being a complication.

Unfortunately- the only available

place who could take our baby was all the way in Manhattan at Schwarzman Animal Medical Center. As we were trying to figure out what our best options- the vet did tell us this would be the most successful option & give her the best quality of life. Surgeries like this aren’t cheap and she expressed that surgeries like this can be close to 15,000. At this point we are at a standstill of if this is something we can truly afford to save our baby’s life and give her the best chance at walking again with her friends. We couldn’t imagine not taking the chance of bringing her home and watching her slowly deteriorate or taking the good chance surgery goes well and she has 90% function of walking again and living her best life. To think our gorgeous, smiley, cuddley, little piggy girl cannot enjoy her life doing her zoomies and being happy was just unbearable.

As we were at AMC- they confirmed she has IVDD and her MRI showed disc herniations. At this point we had to make a decision quickly due to her already being sedated for the scan. It was her best interest to undergo surgery and we hope she comes out of this surgery with a full recovery or more range of motion. It is our best afforts to do everything we can for our animals as they are not just pets to us but part of our family.

As we wait to see results from Sushi’s surgery- we hope to get some help on covering her medical expenses for our family as well to recover with her from this. The doctor quoted us 12,000 for her surgery including her stay, scans, procedure and around the clock care for a night or two. Then the emergency facilities were another $1,000 from her pain management, oxygen cage and so forth. As well as in the future after surgery we will need to cover cost of physical therapy or rehab after surgery to make sure she is back to her old self. We will cross that bridge when we get there. For now we are all hoping to see great results and have our Sushi girl back home with us as she is in surgery.

In these efforts we hope we can get any help we can to help us cover the costs of such an expensive procedure. Any little bit helps and we are BEYOND grateful for all the love & support we have gotten from our friends and family. No matter how big or small we appreciate anything everyone is able to do to help our family get our Sushi girl with us. We will be keeping everyone updated with her surgery and where we are at with her recovery on this page as well as our Instagram Parlayvoofrenchies.

Please take the time to share our story with family, friends and wherever it can be shared. All that is left for our family to do is pray that god is watching her and keeping her safe during this scary time in our lives. All we can do for now is wait and hope that Sushi makes a great recovery We sincerely thank you guys from the bottom of our hearts and hope we get to bring our sushi girl home to us soon!