Real life better than fiction
almost back to a normal shape and size. Amazing isn’t it.
To help this healing process, we need to stabilise the bone ends and bring them as close together as possible, and in the same position as normal.
The options Casts
– Fibreglass in lots of cool colours. But there are lots of problems with casts on my patients. For a start, they can’t tell you if they are too tight or if they are rubbing anywhere. And if they are too loose, they pull them off.
Also they won’t sit around quietly for a few weeks with a cast on like we would. Instead, they run around wearing the end down and getting it wet at every opportunity. Result: smelly infected nasty skin! The use of casts has been described as a race between fracture healing and problems developing, as well as owner and vet frustration and rising costs associated with frequent rechecks and re-bandaging. Casts aren’t often a cheap and successful option in the end.
The success rate of casts, especially in cats and toy breed dogs, is sometimes quoted as low as 15 per cent. But in saying that, sometimes there aren’t many options.
– Only some bones will let you put a nice big stainless steel pin down them as others are too small or two curvy, eg Corgi and Staffie legs. The large upper leg bone (femur) of our furry feline friends is one of the few that a pin works well in.
Pins
– These are the go. I get to use the drill and screwdriver. But seriously, this gives a great result with certain stability and rapid bone healing with early return to full normal function again.
Plates and screws
– In some situations, you can insert pins from the outside through the bones and then connect these like Meccano on the outside. Sort of like those head braces you see occasionally which are fixed to the skull.
So back to Beebs. We fixed his broken leg with a nice plate and a few screws. Three days later, he walked out of the hospital to a very happy family.
Pins from the outside
Who could forget the time an aircraft full of passengers landed in the frigid Hudson River in New York and everyone survived.
Amazing. The captain seemed like such a nice, calm and humble guy, too.
And it turns out Chelsey ‘‘Sully’’ Sullenberger is the stoic old-school hero he came across as – ‘‘I did what I had to do,’’ sort of stuff.
Doing what he had to involved crash landing a plane that had lost both its engines in a rare double bird strike and not losing a single passenger. So well did he land his plane that it didn’t suffer any major damage on impact.
Not long after pulling off his aviation miracle, Sullenberger released Highest Duty, written with the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey Zaslow, who died in 2012. Now, thanks to the movie Sully, starring Tom Hanks, the book’s been rereleased, taking the big screen’s title. And like any Hollywood blockbuster, it’s easy to lose yourself in the narrative in this well-paced life story of just over 300 pages.
Sullenberger describes his career in the sky and his dedication to airmanship. For most of the book there’s a nice backwards and forwards as he links strands of his back story to events on January 15, 2009 – the day his life changed forever. His tales of learning to fly in a farmer’s plane, taking off from a back-country field, and his more fastpaced military career, detail exactly how this methodical man became the world’s most famous pilot. The chapters describing the day that saw him ditch into the river are fascinating as we’re taken second by second into Sullenberger’s thought processes, with their impressive clarity and calmness. After the flight, he reveals he was riddled with self-doubt. Could he have done better? Was landing in the river the right option? In the end the officials agreed it was the only option and Sullenberger’s performance was faultless. Sully gives us a thorough look at the life of a thorough man who became a hero.