Bicycle Mishap for Tucker

D. E. Larsen, DVM

June and her two boys, Joe and Josh, were waiting impatiently in the reception with what looked like a rather painful Tucker.

Tucker was about a three-year-old Springer Spaniel who was usually bouncing off the walls in the clinic. Today he was standing, hunched up and reluctant to move. Something must be terribly wrong.

Dixie had them in the exam room, but Tucker was so painful that he was still on the floor.

“What’s up with Tucker?” I asked when I entered the room.

“Joe ran over him with his bicycle a couple of hours ago,” June said as Joe held up his elbow to show me a road rash he had sustained. “He seemed okay when it happened but then started getting painful. Just a little painful at first, but then it started getting worse. He doesn’t want to move now.”

I squatted down to look at Tucker, and he snarled as I reached out to touch him.

“I think I had better fashion a little muzzle for him,” I said. “He is so painful he doesn’t want to be touched.”

“He won’t bite,” June said.

“Under normal circumstances, that may be true,” I said. “But when a dog is painful, he will bite, I assure you. So just to be safe, I am going to tie his mouth with a loop of gauze.”

I took about three feet of roll gauze and made a loop in the middle with one throw. I placed the loop over Tucker’s muzzle and pulled it tight with the throw on top of his muzzle. Then I crossed the gauze under his muzzle and tied the ends behind his head.

Then leaving Tucker on the floor, I carefully started to run my hands over him to find the source of his pain. Tucker snarled at my very touch.

Tucker showed no response as my hands started at his nose and moved over his head and down his neck. There was no pain in his front legs or chest. I stood up and moved behind Tucker to carefully palpate his back and hips. He tensed and growled when I started to palpate his hind legs, but that growl stopped when I reached his knees and lower legs. I carefully pushed on his abdomen, no pain was detected. I moved back to his hind legs, and the growl started again. I lifted his rear up to look closer, and there it was.

Tucker’s right testicle was almost twice the size of his left testicle. I reached to touch the swollen testicle, and Tucker sort of exploded. Without the muzzle, I would have been bitten. Tucker maintained contact with my left arm with his muzzled mouth, just to make sure I wouldn’t try to touch that again.

“Well, it looks like I found it,” I said. “Tucker must have gotten a testicle ran over.”

“I am shocked,” June said. “I have never seen him act like that before.”

“Don’t hold it against him,” I said. “When these guys are really painful, that is their only defense.”

“What do we need to do with him,” June asked.

“I need to get him under anesthesia and figure out what happened to that testicle,” I said. “My guess is that it is going have to be removed. I just need to make sure there is not a hernia involved.”

“It looks like that is our only choice,” June said. “Can you do that right away?”

“I have a couple of things to do first, but we will give him some pain stuff while he waits for surgery,” I said. “The best thing would be to take both of those things while we are doing this. It really wouldn’t add anything to the surgery bill and would make a better dog out of him.”

“I will ask Jerry, but we have talked about neutering Tucker before, and Jerry is pretty dead set against it,” June said. “Sort of a guy thing, I guess.”

“Okay, but just between you and I, Tucker’s life will be much happier if he is neutered,” I said. “He won’t be worrying about that little chippy down the street. Or fighting with the big dog down there with her.”

“I know,” June said. “But I’m afraid there is no changing Jerry’s mind.”

“Okay, I will plan to only remove the injured testicle unless I hear from you,” I said. “We will be getting to surgery in an hour or so. Is that enough time for you to talk with Jerry?”

“I think so,” June said. “But if you don’t hear from me, just remove the injured testicle.

I gave Tucker a dose of Innovar for pain and put him in a kennel while we finished things up so we could get him into surgery.

June called the clinic just before we started into surgery with Tucker to confirm that Jerry did not want to remove both testicles unless necessary. 

“You could tell him a little white lie,” Dixie said with a smile. She knew I would not do that.

“I have to be able to live with myself,” I said. “Telling little lies makes that hard to do, and it leads to bigger lies. Pretty soon, you can’t remember what you said to whom.”

We prepped Tucker, and I made a mid-line incision in front of the scrotum. Then, pushing the injured testicle into the incision, I incised the soft tissues over the testicle and pushed the testicle out of the incision.

The problem was immediately apparent. There was a full two twists in the cord of the testicle, a testicular torsion. There was no saving this testicle. The bicycle wheel must have spun this testicle as it ran over it.

At this point, I opened the tunic covering the testicle. I completed a standard orchiectomy, removing the injured testicle and closing the incision.

We recovered Tucker from anesthesia, and we had the old Tucker back, bouncing around the kennel. He was ready to go home.

I called June to give her the news. 

“June, Tucker can go home anytime this afternoon,” I said. “He had a complete torsion of his right testicle. The bicycle wheel must have spun it around a couple of times. There was no saving the testicle, but Tucker is wide awake and bouncing around like the old Tucker we know.”

When Tucker was picked up, he was jumping up and licking at the faces of both Joe and Josh, showing no remorse for the accident, if he was even aware of it at all.

Photo by John Debrey on Unsplash

From the Archives, one year ago

Colleagues

Rose’s Boys

D. E. Larsen, DVM

The exam room was crowded with Rose, her two boys, and the cat. The cat was a rough-looking little gray tabby female who looked like she had just come off the street.

“Good morning, Rose,” I said. “I don’t think we have seen you before.”

“We just moved here from Florida,” Rose said. “I have been a nurse in the Navy and just transferred to the Navy Reserves.”

“That must have been quite a move,” I said. “Are you pretty well settled in at this point?”

“Yes, and we like it here,” Rose said. “And the boys found this cat out in the field, and it has made itself at home. I just wanted to get her shots and probably deworm her. Maybe you can tell if she has been spayed yet. I don’t think we are ready for a litter of kittens just yet.”

“Let’s look her over a little,” I said. “It looks like she has probably been out in that field for some time. She is a little thin and rough around the edges.”

With Rose’s concern about the cat being spayed, I picked her up to palpate her abdomen before doing an exam.

“I don’t think I need to look for a scar from a spay surgery,” I said. “This little cat is already carrying a little surprise package of four kittens in the hopper.”

“Oh, great,” Rose said. “Can we just leave her here and have you do everything.”

“We can probably do that. This is an early pregnancy,” I said as I continued to look over the cat. 

And then, I noticed a patch of dry, scaly skin on her right temple.

“I think we better get the black light and look this cat over a bit,” I said.

“A black light. Do you think she has ringworm?” Rose asked.

“This is a pretty suspicious-looking skin lesion on her face,” I said as I slipped out of the exam room to grab the black light.

“Okay, boys, we are going to turn the lights out for a couple of minutes,” I said. “Are you okay with that?” 

Rose’s boys looked around six or seven and were probably well past the age of being afraid of the dark. But I had learned not to surprise little kids by switching the lights off without telling them what was going to happen.

“These boys are big enough that this will be an adventure,” Rose said.

I turned off the light in the exam room and switched on the black light to allow it to warm up. We stood in the dark. I kept a hand on the cat so she wouldn’t get lost.

“We’ll stand here for a moment, so our eyes adjust, and then we’ll look at this cat with this special light,” I explained to the boys.

After a couple of minutes, I pointed the black light at the boys so they could see the change of color of their tee shirts. Then I turned my attention to the skin lesion on the cat.

The lesion on the cat’s temple glowed green. There were many broken hair shafts in the very green lesion. I pointed these out to Rose.

“You can see how the individual hair shafts are broken, and they glow green under the black light,” I said. “This lesion is ringworm. I will do a skin scraping to make sure there are fungal spores. We can culture it if you like, but we will start treatment right away.”

“Do you think a culture is necessary?” Rose asked.

“No, when the black light exam and the skin scraping leaves no questions, I consider a culture to be elective,” I said. “This lesion will be mostly resolved by the time we get culture results.”

I turned on the lights and started to collect items to do a skin scraping when Rose grabbed one of her boys and turned his back toward me.

“Will you look at this with your black light?” Rose asked.

This boy had a half-dollar-sized skin lesion on the back of his head. His hair was cut short, so there was no problem seeing the lesion.

“Rose, I can’t look at your son,” I said. “But you know, I will get this scraping from the cat, and it will take me several minutes to look at it under the microscope. I will leave the blacklight here while I am out of the exam room looking at this sample under the microscope.”

I collected the skin scraping and left the blacklight, plugged in, and turned on, setting on the counter.

“This will take me several minutes,” I said as I started out the door. “You need to keep this door closed, so the cat doesn’t escape.”

The hair shafts on the skin scraping were covered with fungal spores. There was no question about the diagnosis of this cat. I busied myself to give Rose enough time with the black light.

“Rose, there is no question on the diagnosis of the cat,” I said. “That skin lesion is a ringworm lesion. With her pregnancy, we will make an exception and hold on to her for a spay. We will get her vaccinated and dewormed. We will give her a bath with some anti-fungal shampoo and get her started on both oral and topical medication to get that ringworm under control. We will probably need her for two or three days.”

“What should I do with these boys?” Rose said. “They both glowed just like that cat.”

“If they would like, we can give them both a bath in the tub in the back. We could do it at the same time we do the cat and use an anti-fungal shampoo.”

“No way,” both boys said in unison.

“You need to talk with a doctor, or at least, a pharmacist,” I said. “You want to get this stuff under control before it spreads.”

***

Everything turned out okay. We spay the cat, and the ringworm resolved. Rose and the boys visited the local doctor, something they needed to do anyway, and the lesions on the boys resolved with proper treatment.

Over the years, multiple cats were blamed for ringworm on kids. Sometimes, I believe that was the case. But I was never convinced about the asymptomatic carrier state for cats. I cultured many cats without lesions and never found a single cat that cultured positive when they had no visible lesions.

Photo by Piers Olphin from Pexels