Your What? is Limping?

     Friday, January 2, a holiday for many but I went to the clinic to do paperwork and inventories and all the dull stuff.  I didn’t think I would be seeing many patients.  But I was precisely two sips into my first cup of coffee when the phone rang.  My tech told me Susie was on the phone and it didn’t sound like a social call. Now the reader will recall that Susie is one member of a wonderful covey of caretakers at the Tallahassee Museum of Natural History.  These folks are pros in every sense of the word so when there is anxiety coupled to their words you can figure it’s going to be a long day.

     “Dr. Griggs, my Muntjac is limping,”  she offered as she got right to the point.

      My tech was right, no “Happy New Year” tone here.  I sat down with my coffee to hear this one out.  Fortunately for me, one of the other keepers had brought me a poster about the new visiting animal exhibit featuring the Chinese Muntjacs.  I at least had a picture of this alien beast that I had never even seen, hanging right over my desk.  As Susie recited symptoms and circumstances I gazed through, still half conscious eyes at the photo of a Muntjac. The little thing sure had skinny little legs I thought.  Hope it isn’t broken and if it is I hope the fracture is high in the leg.

     I asked Susie how it moved and she replied, “In a blur.”

 Great. How are we going to catch it?  She said Mike and his blow gun most likely. 

Muntjacs - Bobbie is the blurred one.

     The Muntjacs are in a very public exhibit and the Museum is open and it’s a holiday and geeze, this just keeps getting better (worse?).  I told her I’d see her in the  afternoon and I would bring the X-ray equipment and some capture drugs. I hung up the phone, leaned back in my chair, looking at the picture and sipping my, now cool, coffee. This could be interesting.

     Melody and I arrived on a T-shirt warm afternoon and went straight to the Muntjac exhibit for our first glance at these mysterious little deer.  My first impression was that they are real small (about Spaniel sized) and real fast (as in Roadrunner speed) .  Three of the four of the little deer in the exhibit were busy.  I mean they were everywhere, all the time, flitting around like wrens trapped in a garage. One was lying in the corner. That one was obviously my patient.

     After much discussion about how much they weighed we calculated an anesthetic dose and Mike the bushman loaded his blowgun. Now, I like blowguns because they are relatively safe and don’t hurt the animals.  Mike, as you know, is good with a blowgun but what I saw reminded me of a blindfolded kid and a pinata.  His first shot at the fleet footed Muntjac put the rear wall of the enclosure to sleep for 6 hours.  The second (an absolute thing of beauty) ricocheted off the warp speed Muntjac and stuck in the dirt. Mike surrendered his blow gun, got his net and went in for round II.

Mike’s even better with a net than he is with his blow darts.  Finally, I got my hands on the little Muntjac called Bobbie. We sedated her with an injection.  She had an obvious fracture of a bone in her lower leg called the canon bone. No X-ray needed to determine that, she would need surgery to have a chance to survive. We decided to head back to the clinic and see if we could help her that night.

  

Bobbies tiny canon bone fracture

Her bone plate before the incision is closed