surreal

The other day at the emergency center a dog came in with a pretty much pathognomonic posture called schiff-sherrington. He was recumbent (laying down) with his front legs stiff in an extended position and his hind legs were limp with flaccid paralysis. Essentially it means he has a spinal cord lesion where the thoracic vertebra meets the lumbar vertebrae--midback. As we talked to the owner and got set up for radiographs to diagnose it, we watched his signs get more severe--his legs got more stiff, he lost all reflexes in his hind limbs and his head started to bend backwards in what's called opisthotonus, another sign of schiff-sherrinton. We radiographed him and sure enough, his vertebrae had fractured right at the thoracic-lumbar junction, almost completely severing his spinal cord.

The surreal part was that I had studied schiff-sherrington the night before. It was almost creepy.

There is no treatment (not even palliative) for schiff-sherrington, so the dog was humanely euthanized. The owners were distraught--they had no idea how this had happened--the dog was outside on a line and the owners had gone inside for a few minutes only to return and find him like this. Sad story:(