Dr. Lera Clone walks through Balou's recovery after being hit by a car. CT scans revealed skull and nasal bone damage, so the team used a feeding tube and tape muzzle to immobilize his jaw while it healed. Young cats typically recover in 4 to 6 weeks; Balou is now eating on his own.
Two to three years old.
About 12 weeks.
Approximately 10 to 12 weeks.
About 4 to 6 weeks.
About 6 to 8 weeks.
Hey guys. Dr. Lehrer, here today. I am here with Balou. Balou is a two to three year old domestic shorthair. And the topic of the video today is regarding hit by car and just some of the different injuries that happened and how we figured out what was going on and what the treatments were and kind of the long term prognosis. Stay tuned and we'll get into that momentarily. All right, so Blue was actually hit by a car probably about 12 weeks ago. And Baloo went to one of the local specialty hospitals in the area. They ended up having to go ahead when they did the imaging on Blue. What they did was they went ahead and did a CT scan. And so the CT scan is a superior form of imaging for the skull, the nose and anything like in this particular area. The reason that it's so critical is because there are so many different kinds of little angles and bones and that kind of stuff where it's going to be really challenging to be able to visualize everything on X rays. You're going to have to take a bunch of X rays. You may not necessarily get exactly what it is you're looking for versus with the CT scan. The CT scan is essentially just kind of like, I don't know if you guys have ever seen those movies where I can't. I think it's from, oh, what is, what's the show? Westworld on HBO or Cinemax or Showtime, whatever it is, where what they do is they essentially go ahead and they have a horse and then they kind of drop all these people pieces of glass through it and keep a straight face. And, and so what ends up happening is you're actually able to go ahead and take a look at the different parts and you can actually rotate it, you can flip it. So it's something that's very, very helpful when looking at the skull and that kind of stuff. And it's also really good at looking at very, very small areas. So in a patient like Balou, the, the, the ability to go ahead and manipulate the images and get all that data is why we look at doing the CT scans. That being said, they also did X rays on him and did some blood work just so that we could evaluate his, his heart, his lungs and his abdomen as well. One of the things that you guys notice is that Balou has this feeding tube. And so the feeding tube was placed because Balou had to have a muzzle on for about 10 to 12 weeks, allowing that jaw time to go ahead and heal. If Balou was moving too much or if Balou was eating regular food, then that could have potentially caused the jaw to not be stable enough. And so you say, what do you mean stable? So essentially, whenever we do any sort of fracture repair or broken bone repair, there are two things that are super important. One is a blood supply. Because blood supply, so unless the tissue is hanging by a thread, we're always going to have good blood supply. But the other really important thing is a stability. And so when we talk about stability, we mean, you know, the example that I always use is it's kind of like if you break the handle on, on a coffee mug and you super glue it back to the coffee mug. If you try to pick up the coffee mug by the handle before the glue has had time to set, then what ends up happening is it moves or it breaks back off again. And so that's the same thing with the fractured bones. And you know, typically for younger animals, you know, like less than a year of age, we're talking about about a four to six week window to go ahead and get those bones to heal. Assuming again, good stability and also assuming good blood supply. If you have an adult dog, then you're looking at about six or a cat, you're looking about six to eight weeks for the bones to heal. That's assuming again that they are not moving around. In this particular case, it has to do more with him having his, his mouth or his having a muzzle on. In this particular case, Balou had a tape muzzle where they had kind of fit it around. And so it was something that the owners actually became comfortable making just because it's something that is important. You know, the cats can mess it up, that kind of stuff. Now when we have things like that on these particular patients, especially even feeding tubes, it's not a bad idea to potentially have a E collar on, because if they are going ahead and not wearing an E collar, it can give them the ability to scratch out the stitches that hold the feeding tube in place. Of course, we wanted to have the feeding tube there so that way we could minimize the movement. Again, I wasn't the one who placed the feeding tube. I'm just the one who came in on the second half of the story and helped Balou's parents go ahead and take care of him. The thing that you have to make sure that is super important is that when you start feeding them food to the feeding tube, it's usually a smaller amount. And then because you need to give the body or the stomach time to stretch and adapt to the volume that you're putting in there. The great thing about a feeding tube is you don't have to struggle with them to give them medications or anything like that. So if it wasn't so invasive, it would be like, oh my God, like if my pet, who's real hard to give medications to be like, great, just put a feeding tube in them. But that's really invasive. So, no, we don't do that kind of stuff on a regular. The next thing for Blue was we ended up getting to a point where we were able to increase the amount of food. And then the owners had asked me, they said, hey, you know, can we go ahead and do a CT scan? Can we do X rays? Because they had spent a lot of money on, you know, getting them taken care of, getting the surgeries, all the imaging and that kind of stuff. And when I spoke to my surgeons, they said, for the exact reasons why I told you why it was advantageous to do the CT scan, that doing X rays, even on a sedated patient would not be equivalent to going ahead and doing a CT scan. So although, you know, if you're, if you're in a similar situation where you need a follow up CT scan, there's a possibility that you may end up shooting the X rays, spending the money on the X rays and then that may not be sufficient and then you're going to have to go on to going ahead and spending the money, doing a CT scan. Last thing with Ballou, when he was having his issue, one of the issues that he was having because of the injuries that he experienced, his jaw was popping in and out of place. And so when that happens, we anticipate that's tied to some damage to some ligaments or tendons and that kind of stuff, as well as bony structures. With that happening, when I spoke to the surgeons, you know, you'll have a general surgeon and then you can have an oral surgeon. And those are the two people that are usually going to be working on cases like this. They were saying that there may be a point where we may not be able to get him back to normal, but we could potentially go ahead and manage him. Great news. Balou is doing much better. He's eating on his own now. He's starting to eat regular food, and now we're just pretty much flushing this tube. So kudos to Balu's owners, kudos to Baloo, and kudos to the emergency hospital that did end up going ahead and getting this process started. If you guys have any videos about what happened with the loo or anything else, please leave it in the comment box. If you found this video helpful, please give us a thumbs up. Really helps us with the YouTube algorithm. If you know somebody who needs to watch it, please share it with them. We really just want to get out there and help as many people as possible. So thanks for watching and have a blessed day.
