Franklin Vets
Franklin Vets - excellence in veterinary care for dairy, farming, lifestyle, equine and household pets. BESTPRACTICE ACCREDITED NZ.
He was immediately lame and was taken to the emergency clinic in Manukau overnight, where x-rays showed he had a particularly nasty break to his lower leg.
The leg was splinted, and Hank made comfortable with a cocktail of drugs.
The next day he came to our clinic in Pukekohe, and a surgical plan was drawn up for repair.
There were several challenges with this fracture. The fracture is complicated because there were more than two fragments, and the shape of the fracture (spiral) resulted in cracks going up the leg close to the knee (stifle) joint, which is the one at the top of the x-ray image. And Hank is a big boy at 35kg, which means lots of weight for the implants to carry. Hank is also very young, so the bones are still growing, and this restricts where the screws can go. If they go too close to the joints at each end of the bone, growth will be impaired and his leg will grow abnormally.
In Hank’s case, we opted for orthogonal plating, using two plates placed at right angles on the bone, since each plate could only have screws at its ends and not in the middle over the fractured area. Two plates enable us to get greatly increased strength in a situation like this.
A bone graft was taken from his shoulder and packed into the fracture site to make healing proceed faster.
Hank was a model patient and healed very well.
At 6 weeks after surgery, x-rays showed the fracture to be healing very well, and Hank was walking around normally. He will still take a bit of time for healing to complete, but he should be able to return to a full and active life soon.
Once again, it’s very satisfying seeing cases like this, where you can get a great result and have the patient back and running around again. And with dogs like Hank, it’s also a lot of fun. Not many people have a job where they’re paid to fix broken animals and see them happily playing again, and for that, I consider myself very fortunate.
Paul Eason BVM&S MANZCVS (Surgery; Emergency and Critical Care Medicine)
Franklin Vets - excellence in veterinary care for dairy, farming, lifestyle, equine and household pets. BESTPRACTICE ACCREDITED NZ.
