Dr. Lera Clone examines Charles, a dog limping on his back right leg, and finds a swollen third digit on the paw. She rules out an ACL injury and recommends starting with antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and blood work. If those don't help, she'll do a fine-needle aspirate and X-rays to check for infection, cancer, or bone damage.
Hey, guys, my name is Dr. Larry here at Heron Lakes Animal Hospital. Today I'm here with Charles. Charles is coming in because Charles was limping or is limping on his back right leg. And so one of the biggest concerns for me about a dog limping on their back right leg, especially if they weren't using, which Charles wasn't using earlier, is a concern about an ACL tear, also known as a craniocruciate layer. Now, when I do my physical examination, the I work from the toes all the way up to either the shoulder in Charles's case, or to his hip. Okay. And the reason I do that is because there is, there are a number of different joints or parts in the leg that can lead to limping on that one leg, sometimes even on front leg limping. We'll go ahead and we'll check the neck or the back, and then in the back legs we'll check the hips or even the lower back to see if there are any sort of issues. So with Charles today, when he came in, I started my physical exam and I went from toe to toe and as soon as I went on his third digit. So typically when we're counting the digits on cats or dogs, you count your thumb as 1, and then it goes 2, 3, 4, 5. Now, even if they don't have a dewclaw, which is that little clip claw on the inside, you still gotta count it as if it's there. And so if you come over here, you'll be able to see what Charles's swollen toe looks like. It's pretty noticeably swollen. And what we're gonna do is we're going to go ahead and we are going to show you his other back toes just so that you can see as a comparison how thin they are in comparison. This would be the swollen toe that we would go ahead and compare. And Charles is doing a little dancing for us going ahead and try and keep our great photographer and videographer busy. That way, you know, he's always off his toes. So the plan normally would be, is we would go ahead, we would put him on some antibiotics, some anti inflammatories, and because of the amount of swelling there, I would definitely want to do some blood work. Typically I'm looking for any evidence of increased white blood cell count, any sort of changes in the globulin. The globulin will be another indication of some sort of major infection. Okay. In an ideal scenario, we would go ahead and do what's called a fine needle aspirate. We've talked about that on previous videos. What that is is we stick a needle into the tissue trying to get an idea if there's any sort of cancer or infectious diseases. The last thing that we would do is we would do X rays. X rays would help us to take a look to see if there's any sort of bone involve versus if it's just soft tissue. So that's really the reasons why we would do what it is I would like to do in this particular patient with Charles. What we're going to be doing today is we're going to be putting them on some antibiotics, some anti inflammatories and some and we're going to do some blood work. Now if that doesn't work then the next step is for us to go ahead and do some of those other tests that we talked about, sticking the needle in the tissue, trying to collect some samples there and also doing the X rays. If you guys have any questions about this particular video, please leave them in the comments. If you found that video helpful, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe and share. Thanks for watching. Have a great day.
