Welcome to August's Case of the Month! Between computer problems and getting a new doctor familiar with our practice, it's been a rough job getting a case together this month. I've got a quick one, still in progress, which I hope will have an update sometime in the future. Well, here goes:

 

MY ACHING FOOT!

 

HISTORY

Wanderer was a young (1 1/2 year old) cat who had disappeared and been missing for 6 days. When she returned, she obviously had a serious injury of one of her back feet.

 

PHYSICAL FINDINGS

Wanderer's foot was broken across what would be equivalent to the bridge of our foot - she had 4 bones sticking out of the skin, and pus was oozing out of the wound. When we held the ends of her toes, she tried to curl them and pull them away, but couldn't. We flushed the wound with an antibiotic flush and wrapped the foot until we could x-ray it.

 

X-RAY RESULTS

broken toes

Wanderer had badly broken all 4 metatarsal bones of her hind foot. One was actually dislocated from the ankle joint, and the bone end had dried out and looked dead. She also had lost some of the skin from the area of the wound.

TREATMENT

Wanderer had surgery to repair the broken bones. There were several objectives we had to accomplish:

Two of the bones had to be shortened because of dead bone, and the remaining two bones were fixed in place with stainless steel pins less than 1/20th of an inch in diameter. The wound was closed as much as possible, and bandaged for protection. Wanderer was started on antibiotics and sent home the next day.

fixed toes

DISCUSSION

Wanderer has been back for a few visits so far. We've had to change the bandage a couple of times because of discharge from the open part of the wound, but she's starting to use the foot a little. Because of the severity of her injury, her recovery will likely take a long time, and we always have the risk of infection and the bones not healing well. We'll keep you posted...

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