Back Injuries

 

Although rats are agile little animals, they can still succumb to accidents. Fortunately they are also resilient and have a great will to recover.

 

Sandy’s Story

 

During the summer of 2004, Sandy slipped and fell from the shelf in her Jenny cage. She injured her back severely and any movement was causing her extreme pain.

Initially she was dragging her whole rear end along, with her back legs splayed out behind her, and squeaking with the pain.

She was moved to a single level cage overnight.

There was no improvement by the next morning and her legs were also beginning to show signs of distension.

I called the vet who advised to give her Metacam once per day to help with pain and the inflammation, then to take her into the surgery a couple of days later. (She was in too much pain to travel initially and I have a very good relationship with my vet).

There seemed to be no improvement after a couple of days, other than Sandy was attempting to eat soft food provided, rather than staying confined to her bed.

The vet was reluctant to stress her unnecessarily so decided not to anaesthetise and x-ray her, we continued with the Metacam for 1 more week.

One week later, Sandy was showing slight improvement and although still in pain and severely disabled, she was more willing to attempt movement and was able to enjoy having one of her friends visit for short periods every day.

X-rays were performed and showed no breaks or dislocations. The vet concluded that once all the bruising and swelling had subsided, that Sandy should regain her mobility and that the best thing we could do was give her time to recover and continue with the pain medication, just stopping every now and again to see how she was without it.

Over 6 weeks, Sandy regained use of her legs, although with a distinctly odd gait. However, she still had no use of her tail and had lost a lot of weight.

She stopped needing the Metacam and was moved back into a larger cage with her former cagemates.

After several weeks of running around and climbing, her gait returned to almost normal and she had regained use of around 2 thirds of her tail.

By November (5 months later), Sandy had recouped her weight loss and had learned to use her whole tail in a somewhat modified fashion.

Her tail has never regained it’s full flexibility and strength but has a good blood supply and does not appear to cause her any hindrance so it was decided that amputation of the latter part was unnecessary.