Pins
Small pins, big impact.....
We might not always have to use heavy duty plates to repair broken bones.
Occasionally we have quite small pieces of bone broken, or young patients and the techniques we can utilise involve much smaller and finer pieces of steel.
This x-ray on the right shows a broken thigh bone just above the knee.
This tends to occur in young cats.
Getting it back to the right location is always fiddly, but once there, the pins can be inserted in from different directions and will usually be sufficient despite their small size because the thigh muscles act to pull everything together.
The bone was a tiny bone in the middle of the hock - the ankle region.
Think of it like a Jenga tower. Remove one block and it wobbles around. This small bone allowed the hock to collapse.
The pins are only around 1mm in width and anchor the tiny sliver of bone back into the tower, restoring the strength of the Jenga blocks.
Small but mighty !
