Diesel And Sass
The dangers of open windows…
Hot summer weather – uncomfortably warm houses. How better to keep cool than to open the upstairs windows?
Possibly not such a good idea though if there are cats in the house, especially cats that do not usually go outside.
Cats are inquisitive creatures. At the start of the July heat wave this year, 8-year old Sass, normally an indoor cat, decided to explore an open window. Once on the outside sill, she was unable to turn around and fell two stories to the ground beneath. Her owners rushed their very sore white cat in to us, where we were able to establish that while she (luckily) had not sustained any life-threatening injuries, she had broken all four of the long bones in her left back foot and three of the four in her right. After delicate and quite lengthy surgery, we managed to realign the bones using very fine metal pins. However, she needed to have both of her back feet in splints for a couple of months to support them while the bones healed. This is, thankfully, an unusual injury, so we were very surprised when 10 days later 2-year old Diesel (a black cat this time) did exactly the same thing with virtually identical results. Diesel also then had to wear natty splints on both of his back feet for the next 8 weeks after the bones were repaired. Only a week later, and a third case, though one-year old ginger boy “Fluffy” only broke one bone in one foot as he fell one floor not two.
Thankfully, all three cats are now doing well, but the take-home message has to be – all open windows should be left on the latch if one has animals in the house. Sass, Diesel and Fluffy were all relatively lucky in that none of them sustained any internal injuries, but hopefully sharing their stories will avoid the same (or worse) happening to other animals in the future.
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