Chapter 288 - Broken Leg Pt. 1
It was early morning – still dark outside. Enzo hopped over to Abigail and binkied. “Want to play?” he asked.
Abigail replied, “No. I don’t know what I did, but my leg hurts. A lot. I can’t walk on it.”
Enzo said, “Oh. Dat not good. Don’t worry. Show it to Dad. I had a bum leg once. He got it fixed.”
The sun came up and lit up the living room. Abigail waited patiently until she heard Dad come in. “Good morning, buns! How’s everybody doing?” he asked. First, he gave Enzo a pet, then Merlot.
Abigail hobbled over to him and stuck out one of her front paws. Dad asked, “Oh Abigail. Is something wrong? Why are you limping?” Abigail limped around to show him, holding her left front paw off of the ground. “It hurts, Can you help me?” she thought. Dad gently picked her up and touched her paw. She didn’t flinch or cry out. He set her back down.
After breakfast, Dad reviewed all the footage from the bun camera from the previous night. She seemed to be walking normally in the evening, but sometime by early morning, she was limping. There was no unusual activity in between.
Dad looked at Abigail and said, “I think we’d better have the doctor take a look.” Fortunately, her amazing vet could squeeze Abigail in for an appointment that day, so he placed her in her carrier between a rolled up towel for support, and headed over the mountains to the vet.
At the vet, the doctor felt Abigail’s leg and said, “We’d better take some x-rays. It feels crunchy.” Dad handed Abigail over to them and waited anxiously in the examination room.
About a half hour later, the doctor returned and announced, “Yep. She has a broken leg. We have no idea how it might have happened, but it’s definitely broken.” She pulled up the x-ray to show Dad. “How could that have happened?” asked Dad, “I didn’t see anything on the cameras.” The doctor replied, “Who knows. Their bones are hollow. I’ve seen rabbits run into things and break a bone.”
The vet continued, “Unfortunately, the break is too close to the joint, so we can’t do a splint. Normally, you could consider doing surgery and adding a pin, but we don’t do that kind of surgery here and another exotic vet we use for that says it’s too close to the joint to do that. Your choices are to let it heal naturally and hope it grows back OK, or try a specialist like UC Davis and see if they can do anything.”
Dad and Abigail were already familiar with the miracle work that UC Davis could do, after her radiation treatment earlier this year for Thymoma. It had been quite the year for Abigail.
Dad said, “OK, I’ll reach out to her doctor there and see what she says.” The vet said, “In the meantime, you should confine her so she doesn’t run around and make it worse, and give her some pain medication so it doesn’t hurt too much.”
Dad new Abigail was not going to like this. She had always been a free roam rabbit at the House of Buns. He sensed it the road ahead was not going to be fun. There was never a dull moment at the House of Buns!
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