f you are a cat, spring and autumn are the highest risk times for getting run over.

Solo's accident happened about half past nine in the evening when it was just dark. He did not notice the car as he trotted across the road. The driver saw his reflective collar and braked, but unfortunately her front wheel hit Solo just as the car skidded to a halt and Solo's leg was dragged along under the skidding wheel as the car stopped.

Assessing his injuries later at my hospital it was clear he had had a narrow squeak. His breathing was slightly laboured, he had a nasty skin wound on one back leg and he could not stand on the other back leg either.

I was able to get him to lie still for a chest x-ray without knocking him out, and this showed that he had some bleeding into one of his lungs. I decided that this made it too dangerous to give him an anaesthetic that evening so I cleaned and bandaged his wound and gave him pain-killing and antibiotic injections and left my nurse watching over him until the morning.

The next morning his breathing was better enough to risk giving him an anaesthetic. With him asleep I x-rayed his back end. The leg with the wound was not broken but his opposite hip was dislocated.

While Solo was still asleep and with my nurse steadying him I stretched and manipulated his leg until his hip snapped back into place. After a quick x-ray to confirm the hip was back in place I turned my attention to the wound on his other leg.

Like most wounds from road accidents it was really a combination of a graze and a burn. There was nothing I could stitch up so all I could do was meticulously clean it with lots of sterile saline and cover it with a special dressing which would keep the wound moist but take away the fluid that would be bound to seep from the wound.

This sort of dressing has produced a quiet revolution in treating wounds but it was still going to need changing every day or two days for many days.

Gradually as the days went by, his breathing returned to normal. The hip did not cause any more problems.

By five days after the accident he could stand in his hospital cage and after two weeks he went on to every other day dressing changes and I let him go home and just come back on alternate mornings.

he will always have a scar and some missing hair on his leg but he barely limps on it now which is just three weeks after the night of his disaster.

Simon Thomas's practice is at the Gatehouse Veterinary Hospital, Allerton Bradford

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