Little China Doll…

This is often what springs to mind when I look at Esther, particularly in comparison to her littermates, she’s such a finely built and, to be honest, scrawny little dog but she runs and plays with the big dogs and is one tough little cookie, or so I thought. Truth be told the big dogs, particularly Spark and Ethan, pretend to play rough with her but are actually very gentle. The fragility of these little breeds in comparison to the collies became brutally apparent on Weds night when, while running around my bedroom like an idiot before bedtime, she dived across the bed and fell off the edge and screamed her little head off! Now, I’ll admit, I wasn’t terribly sympathetic at first; these terriers can be rather prone to dramatics so I thought she was over-reacting as she hopped around on 3 legs refusing to put her left hind on the floor. I had a quick look and the pain seemed to be coming from the top of her leg/hip…I really wasn’t sure what she’d done…a knock or sprain but she was obviously unhappy…it was late at night so I gave her a double dose of metacam and put her to bed to see how she was in the morning. Come morning she was still holding the leg and very quiet so we went straight down to the vets; after a quick examination it was concluded she’d probably broken her femur (thigh bone) and needed x-rays (cue a very guilty feeling me!). I left her in and went to work and rang after lunch to be told she had indeed broken the femur which was going to require pinning. Poor little girl :o(

x-ray…


The vets said they could do it but suggested she might be better going to an orthopeadic specialist so I immediately called Tom who runs with the Dolphins flyball team and specializes in this kind of surgery at Nantwhich Veterinary Group in Cheshire, he agreed to see her straight away so I took the afternoon off, went and picked her up from the vets and drove down to Cheshire and left her in Tom’s capable hands; we talked through the options and decided on internal surgery rather than the external fixators so she’s had the bone pinned through the centre and plated. This has left for a very neat wound that has been stitched internally so nothing to come out and nothing for her to chew at but this surgery is obviously very invasive, involving a lot of muscle and tissue so she’s still very sore and feeling very sorry for herself.



For the moment she's quite happy being left in her crate sleeping, she has 2 weeks of complete crate rest before she's allowed out for short lead walks, she should be having follow up x-rays in a months time to make sure it's healed and then hopefully, fingers crossed, she'll be good as new.