Elsie came in to see us a few weeks ago when she came home with a very large wound on her back leg. She also had a few smaller wounds and had lost a nail on her front leg. Although we don’t know exactly what happened to Elsie she could have caught her legs on something such as barbed wire.

It was important to clean up Elsie’s wounds and suture them together to help them to heal. For this we had to give her an anaesthetic and some pain relief. Whilst Elsie was asleep we clipped up all of the hair getting into the wounds and flushed them all with sterile water. Wounds can often become contaminated with dirt, stones and hair, so to try and reduce problems with infection we have to clean these away as much as we can.

The next step was to repair the wounds. Some of the smaller wounds just needed a few sutures through the skin to bring the edges together. As the lower legs don’t have much tissue under the skin this was the only layer we had to close. The largest wound was about 5cm long. When bringing skin together we have to make sure that there is not too much tension that would cut off the blood supply. Sometimes we don’t have enough skin left to cover the wound so we have to let the body close the gap itself. This can take much longer than when we can stitch the edges of this skin back together. Elsie was very lucky that her wound came together very easily.

She went home with some pain relief and antibiotics. When we saw her back after five days her wound was healing well. However, her foot was slightly swollen. This can be in response to inflammation but can indicate that some infection is still present. Therefore we added some additional antibiotics in.

A few days later Elsie’s wounds were looking much better with just a few healing scabs left. Soon after she was be able to have her stitches out and started going out to play again-hopefully keeping herself out of trouble this time!