This summer lovely Zjavier turned 13 with many happy celebrations with her family. However, it wasn’t quite the case eight years ago, as just three days before her 5th birthday she had a traumatic fall.
When she was out on a walk like usual, she chased a rabbit, however this time she had a nasty fall down a bank. Her owners were alerted by the most awful squealing, and they only realised it was her when they saw her lying down bent in half with her tail and back legs poking out from under her chin! They were shocked and terrified.
They quickly took her to their local vets who x-rayed her, and even though they couldn’t find a fracture they suspected that her fall had caused severe damage. They sedated her for 24hrs, but she still didn’t make any attempt to move and that’s when the owners did some research to find an MRI scanner and a specialist vet.
This is how they found DWR, so their vet referred her to us as an emergency and the owners drove the hard six hours to get to us. She was immediately taken in by our Neurology team who undertook a number of different types of scans including an MRI.
These diagnostic scans revealed that her spine at T10/T11/T12 had a ‘blast’ injury and her vertebrae was in lots of fragments, luckily her spinal cord was still intact. The Specialist Neurologist reassured the worried owners that he could fix her by operating on her three broken thoracic vertebrae.
Only five days after the spinal surgery she came out of hospital and her owners were so pleased to see her, and her them, as even though she had a little sling under her body supporting her rear end, she was wagging her tail and moving her legs! They couldn’t believe she was supporting her own weight on all four legs!
Over the next six weeks under the care of her owners she had to learn to walk again, but as they live in a beautiful area on the North Wales coast, they could do their own form of hydrotherapy by swimming in the sea with her regularly. After three months she had made a full recovery and was happily running around on land again. Her owners said that apart from a slightly odd back leg walk and a huge scar down her back, all these years she has been in great health.
Her owner said “I cannot thank the DWR team enough for all of your professionalism, expertise and dedication from the moment we arrived all the way to discharge, in what was one of the most difficult and stressful times of our lives. I often think of your team and how thankful I am of all that you did. Thank you, she wouldn’t be here without DWR.”
