A frequent oversight that many new pet owners often make when purchasing new pets is to not truly understanding just how much money it could cost them to take proper care of their new pet's health needs. For the most part, initial considerations are only centered on the immediate cost to purchase the new dog, some food expenses, and perhaps a handful of small common items, such as bowls, dog collars, dog walking leashes, and doggy chew toys.

Face facts people. Having a pet, particularly an active pet, can mean that your pet will likely incur an injury at least once within their lifetime. While no one likes to think that their pet will likely get hurt, it does happen even to the best of owners. This is when many pet owners begin to realize the true total costs involved with owning their new pets.

The largest price tag to owning a new pet is also the one expenditure that we could do without, the unforeseen outlay of cash to pay the expenses of a major pet health problem. Let me show you how quickly these can add up.

Recently our male German shepherd, Axel, broke his right leg, right on the ankle hock and started what was to be a costly sequence of events.

Like any other day, we started out the day with some outside playing. Axel simply loves to play his favorite game of chase the Frisbee. Axel unfortunately does not always like to chase the Frisbee, but instead on this day he decided to leap straight up and catch the Frisbee that was well over his head.

While it happened so fast, I saw it in slow motion. Here's what happened. He jumped vertically to a height of nearly six feet off the ground, spun in midair, and caught the Frisbee. It was a magnificent grab. Then he landed extremely hard and with a load S-N-A-P! The snap was so loud I could hear it from thirty feet away. As I ran to him, he only yelped for a moment. It seemed like forever to me. But to my amazement he actually got up and wanted to have more fun. Except I knew instantly there was a horrifying crisis.

Within minutes we were on our way to our local veterinarian's office. The trip only took a few minutes, and he in reality looked more relaxed then I probably was. The diagnosis was a broken bone that holds the ankle in place. While that was painful for him, it was not going to be the most painful part of the experience. That came for us.

The very next day he was brought to a Veterinary surgical specialist for evaluation. We were told he would need to have surgical pins placed into the bone that had cracked, if we were lucky. The unlucky option was to remove the bone chips and rebuild the bone. Shock set in, and then the true pain hit us. What is this all going to cost? The quoted price of the procedure was anywhere between $2000 and $3000 dollars. How were we going to afford that? What other options were there? We were not even going to consider putting him down, he is our family.

So we took out a loan application at the vet's office to cover the cost of the surgery. Apparently many vets these days offer several financial options to pet owners when this happens, everything from pet insurance, to payment plans, to actual online loan applications.

A few days later he was all patched up and read to go home with us. Of course, now that he was all set to go home with a nice brand new cast on his leg, we felt the worst part was over. Little did we know that his road back to good health would actually cost more then his surgery.

Once he was home, he started chewing on his cast. Oh how he was getting irritated to no end with that cast. He chewed on the top and the bottom eventually getting toes uncovered and putting his leg at risk of further injury. Just about every single week we ended up replacing this cast with a new one. The problem for us was that each time he chewed it off, we had to have the vet put him under anesthesia to put a new one back on. The cost to have this replaced each week averaged to nearly $400 each time it was replaced.

All told he chewed his cast off a total of 7 times over the course of 12 weeks. That is a cost of nearly $2800 just to keep replacing the cast. Add that to the $2100 cost of the surgery itself and various other costs and this one day playing Frisbee cost us over $5000 for one pet.

All this and he is only 1 and 1/2 years old and has many years ahead of him in which he could still get hurt. As always we pray that he never does get hurt, but unlike before, we will take extra measures to further protect our pets against the costs involved to care for him in the eventuality that he does.