Rare Condition Cat

Friday one of my cats got her head stuck in my dog’s mouth.
Well that’s what to dog said happened. It has happened before. Previously it resulted in my continual return to the vets office. After 2 days of wiring, setting and me coming back “Yeah, it looks funny again” the local vets said her jaw couldn’t be set. It was broken in the middle and dislocated. They could fix one or the other but not both.
Fortunately when you live in a farming state there are great schools for veterinarian medicine and out of the box thinkers when it comes to fixing and diagnosing animals. My mom drove me to the veterinarian college a couple towns away.
The surgical vets looked at her, the dental vets looked at her as we discussed why it was hard to keeping the joint AND wire the front of the jaw back together. Finally my mom offers up that at the farm they once glued an animals front teeth together as it had dislocated it’s jaw, but, then it could still suck milk. The vets agreed the idea could work, holding the jaw in location and wiring the front back together. If they glued the top canines to the bottom I would be able to shoot some sort of slurried food in and decided the only problem would be hydration.
The cat cost me over a grand to fix, 6 weeks of feeding slurry and twice daily IV’s of water.

This time she, after the “head in mouth” incident, initially looked fine. Except for the wet sound in her eat and the fact that her head and neck felt a little crinkly when I pet her. Then she shook out a little spatter of blood and we were off to the vet. By the time we got there she had begun to look a bit like a porpoise head, all inflated on the front and rounded. Some how she got air trapped between her skin and muscles, this plus the bleeding or fluid accumulation in the middle ear and the vet could diagnose it. Subcutaneous emphysema. Which is APPARENTLY most often a symptom shown by scuba divers when involving the ear and otherwise stabbing and gun shot wounds. I really wonder what THIS vet did before working here.