9 Lives

Do cats really have nine lives? Well no, they only have one. The nine lives idea is an old wives tale that relates to the hardiness of the feline species. Cats are tough. In veterinary college, the axiom for a cat's bones healing was that if you could get the two ends of the broken bone into the same room, the bone would heal. That's amazing healing! It was true too. The bone repairs I did on cats all worked out well. Dogs were a different story. They could suffer from a non-union, which is a real problem when trying to fix a fracture. If the two ends of a broken bone won't heal together, you have a useless limb on your hands. More complex procedures then come into play, like compression bone plating. This procedure puts a metal plate along side the bone that crosses the fracture and literally compresses the bone together so the two ends will heal. It was fascinating to watch the speed of recovery from this type of surgery. I remember a golden retriever that we fixed a broken tibia on who walked out of the hospital two days later on that broken leg. I was impressed. Cats get fractures of all types. I saw jaw fractures, mostly of the mandibular symphysis, leg fractures, pelvic fractures, and fractures of any bone they had. Most were repairable. Some were not. A particular cat had a fracture of it's pelvis and was abandoned at our Cat Hospital by the owner because they didn't want to pay the cost of the repairs. One of our technicians, Hope Reilly, adopted this cat and named him Lucky. It was Hope's husband, Mike Reilly, who named him Lucky because he was "Lucky To Be Alive". My years of feline specialty practice was exceptionally rewarding and even though cats don't have nine lives, they sure make the most of the one they do have.
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Dr. Doug Ikeler