You know when you stub your toe on the end of the bed and it hurts like heck? Well, the good news is that it is very unlikely you’ve broken anything.
Cats, however, go out and about getting up to mischief and then come back home with broken toe…with no explanation!
This has happened twice this month – Felix, pictured (sporting his cool bandage), somehow managed to break both a metatarsal (ala David Beckham before the 2002 World Cup…) and a toe as well! Poor little chap, no doubt this was genuinely painful and unsurprisingly he was very lame.
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Thankfully diagnosis is easy with xrays and our team looked after him with pain killers and repeated bandaging – 4 weeks later he is running around again like nothing has happened. Toe fractures rarely need surgery – if we manage the animal’s pain and bandage the foot to stop the bones from moving too much then nature should do the trick.
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We had another patient, Mylo the goldendoodle, with a broken toe. You can see his xray here. He only broke one bone this time but as you can see there are two large cracks running down this bone, a tremendous force has basically caused it to explode. Quite what he was up to and how this happened no-one knows! Thankfully Milo is a wonderful patient and lets us bandage him easily, so he is having a few weeks of bandaging and pain relief too, and he should heal well.
It’s not just been broken bones. Leah came in for an unrelated problem but we examined her teeth as part of a full clinical examination. To our surprise we found that one of her large teeth (molars) was fractured – a whole slice of it was wobbling around. In humans this is known to be extremely painful but in a dog we found it accidentally – amazing really. Thankfully by surgically extracting the offending tooth we will have given her almost immediate relief, which is hugely satisfying.
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