Surgical Caseload

Here at Village Vets and Meadowbank we operate 7 days a week and see a vast array of different cases, ranging from routine speys and castrates to more complicated procedures such as fracture repairs and caesareans.

We thought you might like to see some examples of what we get up to: This is Millie, a 1 year old cat who broke the ulnar bone in her elbow. The break was caused by a bullet which shows up as bright white on the picture. We see this surprisingly often. Thankfully an operation to remove the bullet and stabilise Millie's fracture with pins and wires was successful, and she made an excellent recovery.

The chinchilla is Louis, who broke his arm. After a long and fiddly operation we managed to stabilise the bones in his arms using tiny metal pins usually used as venous catheters! The pins go through the bone at different levels, and are then held together outside the skin by a special putty which sets rock hard and holds the pins, and therefore the bone fragments, firmly in place. The only complication we had with Louis was that he constantly gnawed away at the putty, requiring us to repeatedly add more to the frame! Despite this, he made an excellent recovery and the pins were removed after 6 weeks.

Can anyone guess what is in this dog’s stomach? We often find that dogs and cats eat something they shouldn't such as socks or toys, which can get stuck in the intestines and cause a blockage. These items are sometimes quite difficult to diagnose on a radiograph but with Winston here the diagnosis was surprisingly simple: he had eaten a golf ball the week before! The owner suspected a problem as he had been vomiting for the past week, despite being very well in himself. The ball can clearly be seen as the white circle sitting in the stomach in the picture. Luckily this was easily removed and Winston recovered very quickly - we advised walks away from golf courses in future!


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