Houdini Broke His Leg! Cool Vet Stuff 4

Two weeks before Halloween Houdini was catting around in the wee hours of the morning. When he didn't come home for breakfast Andrea and Eric found him caught in a wooden fence. He struggled so hard he fractured the bone above his knee.

The only way to correct the problem was to insert a metal pin down the femur to skewer the fractured edges together.

Here's Houdini ready to go into surgery. Notice Houdini's black hair color extends into the skin as well. Tiger and cheetahs have the same dark stripes and mottling on their skin too.

Six weeks later the pin was ready to come out. Andrea called me. Houdini developed a bump on his hip that was bugging him, he was biting at it.

The bump was expected, it was the pin migrating out, a normal thing that occurs when healing is finished. Now that Houdini was using his mended leg, the pin was working its way out through the hip.

It was time for pin removal.

I could feel the end of the pin through the skin; a blood blister was forming because the end of the pin was wiggling too much under the skin.