Hawk: Surgery Completed

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August 9, 2019    akeaglevet   0 Comment

Hawk: Surgery Completed

By Dr. Scott Ford

The Dakota Zoo didn’t have a veterinarian available to do the orthopedic surgery that the hawk needed so they brought him back to me. Fortunately we had to change sites yesterday so it actually put us closer to them anyway, so it worked out well. I did the surgery this afternoon and it was successful. There was quite a bit of muscle damage so we’ll see how that shakes out down the road, but I’m pretty optimistic.

Thank you to all the great feedback on Facebook. We had some good recommendations on places to turn if things hadn’t worked out well with the Dakota Zoo.

He arrived bright & alert
After a bit of midazolam (for sedation) & butorphanol (opiate pain reliever), he was sleepy and ready for surgery.
We use isoflurane anesthesia delivered by tube into the trachea. For those of you that donated for the ETCO2 monitor a couple of years ago, there’s the little gadget in action! It’s telling us that his end tidal CO2 is 31 mmHg & his breathing rate is 5 breaths per minute.
This fracture required insertion of pins down the center of radius and ulna along with several smaller cross pins. I bound them all together with epoxy putty.
The end result is a bar that holds the pins together on the outside and a single pin inside the radius (you can see the tip exiting the carpus at the left of the photo). The pins will all be removed later after the fracture is healed.
anesthesiafractureorthopedicraptorrehabilitationsurgerywing

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