Is My Dog's Leg Broken? | Limping Causes

Hey, guys. Dr. Lara here today. I'm here with Rocky. Rocky is a five month old papillon. And the purpose of the video today is to talk about puppies with broken legs. So we're going to talk about how it can happen, how we diagnose it, and what we can do in terms of treatment. Stay tuned and we'll get into that momentarily. I know, kiddo. It's okay. All right, so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna pass Rocky off just because he's nervous, and so I don't really want him to be feeling any sort of anxiety. So thank you very much. All right, so in terms of what ended up happening with Rocky, Rocky thinks he's a cat. He's about the size of a cat. And so he thought it would be okay to jump off the back of a couch. Yeah. Not okay. So this was an accident. This was something that, you know, wasn't done. Mom was not neglecting him. And so when he, after he jumped off, he started limping. Mom called me and it was a happy Mother's Day gift. And so I told her, I said it was something that, you know, she could monitor him. If he wasn't writhing in pain, then it was okay to wait till Monday. But she did end up saying that he did seem to be pretty uncomfortable and she was going to be taking him to a clinic. I gave her a couple of names of some places that were open on Sundays. They were able to go ahead and shoot X rays. He did end up having a fracture on his front leg. And with this particular fracture, what we noticed was, or what they noticed on the X rays was that there is. It was a clear fracture, a bunch of. Across a bunch of bones or a few bones. And based on these particular bones being fractured, these bones, usually we do not do surgical correction. Usually what we will do is we will splint the bone. So what a splint is we put a pretty much like a half cast and we put some bandage on it or padding as well, and we stabilize the bone, and so we allow that fracture to heal. Now, when you have a fractured bone, there's typically two things that are super important to go ahead and get that bone to heal. One is going to be a good blood supply. So unless the leg or limb or whatever is dangling by a thread, you're going to have good blood supply. Two is going to be stability. And so depending on where the bones are, where the fracture is, you can achieve stability in a certain way. And so in this particular Case, we decided to use a splint. Now, there are some bones where you'll need to be concerned about twisting forces, you'll need to be concerned about bending forces, you'll need to be concerned about pulling forces. And so in some of those cases, we'll end up needing to use either a plate and screws or something called external fixators. You could potentially have cross pins put in. There are a number of different ways to go ahead and provide stabilization in those patients that have the fractured bones. Now, since Rocky is less than a year of age, typically it is going to take them about four to six weeks for the bone to heal. Assuming that the patient is stable or the fracture is stable and the patient is not too active. That means for those four to six weeks, he should essentially be in a crate or he should be in your arms or on your lap or on the couch. But he should not be running around the house like a nut job, because all it's going to do is it's going to take him every time he moves it. Oh, that's it. Now you got to start the clock again for another four to six weeks. And if that happens enough times, you can actually have a malunion where the body will actually form a callus over the two edges of the bone that are broken. And, and then it doesn't actually heal. And so then you would have to go ahead and do a surgery to re. Break that. Those edges and give you fresh edges so that the body will try to heal it again. Now, usually what we will do is we will change the bandage once every week. Some places will change the bandage once every two weeks. I like to change a bandage once a week because there's a possibility of the patient's developing what are called pressure sores. And so by checking the bandages once a week, we go ahead and reduce the chance of that happening significantly. The other thing that we will typically do is we will go ahead and shoot X rays around two to three weeks in to see how the bone's doing, if it's healing well, if it's not, that'll give us an idea of, hey, let's, we'll want to recheck this or. And it also give us enough information to go ahead and provide proper expectations to the client as to how the process is going. Because sometimes it can be frustrating. I did have another dog in the past that did fracture a toe, and, and that dog was extremely rambunctious. And it actually took about 12 to 14 weeks to heal. So now that dog was older than a year. So normally it's about a six to eight week time frame for the bone to heal. And as you can remember I just said it took about 12 to 14 weeks. So it actually took an additional four to six weeks to get that bone to heal because that dog was too active. That being said, we are able to go ahead and keep the patient with the fracture stable and the hope is that we can avoid any sort of surgery for a break like this. The other thing during that time frame is we will dispense some anti inflammatories initially and then usually what I will do is I will maintain the patients on or I will give the patients gabapentin or provide the owners with gabapentin just in case they feel that the dogs are uncomfortable. Other than that, the dogs usually do really well after the first few days and you'll find that a lot of times they may not even need any sort of pain medications. So just keep that in mind that we always try to minimize the amount of medications that the patients are on. If you guys have any questions about this video, please leave it in the comments. If you have any other questions or want to engage on the social media, we really appreciate that. That really helps us with the algorithm. And in regards to, if you want shorter versions of this, if you follow us on TikTok Instagram, we'll have shorter versions, typically about one minute long. Thanks for watching and have a blessed day.