Miracle Mutts by Laura Greaves

Author:Laura Greaves
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760144449
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia

Dr Abbie Tipler loves a challenge. In her fifteen years as a general practice veterinarian, she has tackled her fair share of difficult surgical cases.

There was Mia, the Queensland dog whose throat was ripped open when she was kicked by a kangaroo. Abbie saved Mia’s life with hours of emergency surgery and a blood transfusion from the family’s second dog, Archie.

Then there was Snowball,* a Samoyed with a congenital bone abnormality called ectrodactyly or ‘lobster claw deformity.’ She assisted in reconstructing his affected paw in an Australian-first operation.

And let’s not forget Rosie* the whippet, who was rushed to Mosman Vet after being attacked by another dog. Her airway was dangerously swollen and she was struggling to breathe.

Rosie would not have survived transfer to a specialist hospital, so Abbie had no choice but to perform an emergency tracheostomy while a specialist colleague guided her through the procedure over the phone. (Adding another layer of drama, electricians working near the clinic were threatening to cut the power, forcing Abbie to spend precious minutes persuading them to wait.) Rosie made a full recovery.

So when she was confronted with Millie the greyhound’s mangled leg, Abbie was saddened but by no means discouraged.

‘Millie had very little from the carpus [wrist] down. You can’t just have a dog with a stump because they try to walk on it and it becomes traumatised,’ Abbie explains. ‘Amputation was the obvious option.’

But it wasn’t the only option. As soon as she saw Millie, Abbie thought she might be a good candidate for a prosthesis – an artificial foot. It was the same thought that had occurred to Ed.

‘Once you’ve amputated you can’t put the leg back on, so the thought process was that we really had nothing to lose,’ she says. ‘Millie was a very young puppy and it seemed a real shame to amputate her leg.’ She also knew that, being a young dog, they could train Millie to tolerate a prosthesis. ‘She had the right temperament – if she had been aggressive or anxious it wouldn’t have been right.’

Together, Nora, Ed and Abbie began to investigate potential suppliers of prosthetic limbs. They soon found a company in the United States, which produced a prosthetic foreleg and paw made from moulded plastic, rubber pads and foam inserts into which Millie’s leg would fit snugly.

The limb cost $1200. Mosman Vet and Greyhound Rescue raised a combined $6000 to fund Millie’s prosthesis and ongoing veterinary care.

But before Millie could test out her new leg, what remained of her existing foot had to heal enough to receive it – and that was easier said than done.

‘Getting her into a condition where we could click on a prosthesis was a bit of a challenge because she had a big, open wound and didn’t have skin covering it,’ says Abbie. ‘We tried to do a skin graft, but it didn’t take.’

Eventually she had to remove more of the leg – amputating just below her elbow – and cover the stump with Millie’s skin.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.