Gimli – Open Comminuted Distal Tibial Fracture

The Catastrophe

Gimli was unable to weight bear on his right hind leg. As is often the case with cats they come home unable to walk on a leg and nobody ever knows what happened other than they used up one of their nine lives.

Gimli’s leg was flopping from side to side and was clearly broken. Ouch. Unfortunately the bones were coming through the skin.

The Fracture

This was an open comminuted distal tibial fracture. Lots of fracture fragments and not a lot of bone in the distal fragment to apply a plate to.

An open fracture is when the bone comes through the skin. When a bone comes through the skin it gets bacteria and dirt on it.

This is about the worst possible thing that can happen to fractured bone. Infected bone will not heal and we end up with a non union. Dr Rob has his work cut out on this one.

The Repair

This was quite a challenging repair. We lavaged and flushed the wound and the bone fragments as there had been contamination from the bone passing through the skin.

Dr Rob placed a pin down the bone to align the fracture segments and then was able to get a plate on the medial surface of the tibia. We were able to repair the fracture using a plate-rod repair.

Gimli has been doing very well on this leg since the repair.