Your Pet's Best Friend

Snake-bites and Facial Swelling

Most of the snakebites that I have to deal with here are from copperheads.  We do have cotton-mouth water moccasins, but most of my patients are not in the water so much.   Usually you just see some facial swelling, as dogs typically go in nose first, and the snake bites them on the lip.   You treat them for pain, for inflammation, and give antibiotics, as the puncture wounds from a snake bite can get infected, just a like a dog-bite wound.  Puncture wounds are deeper than they are wide, so you can't really wash them.  The snake's mouth is dirty, just like your own (well maybe not JUST like, but everybody's mouth is full of germs), so the bite wound can get infected.

So, you have a Pit Bull, and his face swells up until he looks like a Shar Pei (at least his upper lips do).  Use your imagination, or Google up some Shar Pei pictures.

Then there is today's case.  This is the worst case of post-snake-bite swelling I have ever seen.  The owner says that this is actually reduced from the night before when the dog grabbed the snake.  This dog usually looks like the Pit Bull on the left here.  Now he looks like a Neapolitan Mastiff.

My patient on the left, a Neapoloitan Mastiff on the right. I think he will be fine, but he has some mongo swelling.

Osteomyelitis in a Toe

This is Storm today.  She looks pretty happy.  That's because her toe is not hurting nearly so badly as it was 10 days ago.  Now she can walk on her right hind paw, though it still gets sore toward the end of the day.

 Here she is 10 days ago, not putting that paw on the ground at all.  It hurts too much to bear any weight on toe #5.  

Here's a close-up of toe #5 before beginning treatment.  It does NOT look good. The X-rays look bad, too.

 

 

 

Here are normal toes on the left, and the affected toe on the right.  The third phalanx (last bone at the tip, also abbreviated P3) is the bone the nail grows from. Notice that the P3 on that bad toe just looks like it exploded. (Sorry my pictures are not as well in focus as I'd like.) 

That could be anything from a bone infection (osteomyelitis) to bone cancer.  There could have been a wound, a nail pulled loose and infected, a penetrating foreign object.  A biopsy could be your next step (taking a small piece of abnormal tissue).  Sometimes that doesn't give you all the information you'd like to have.  In this case, the clients opted for a trial therapy of antibiotics first.

If you don't have bone cancer (or some other kind of cancer that happens to be eating into the bone nearby) and if you picked the right antibiotics (and they get into the bone), it might get better.  If it does, great, and keep taking your medicine for the next four to six weeks.  If not, it's biopsy time, or maybe even amputation time (the toe, not the leg).

And it is better, at least 50% better.  The swelling is down by half, and (as noted above) she can walk most of the day on it before it starts getting sore.  So, we're optimistic.  It may still "go south" on us, but we're optimistic (and continuing treatment).