It was the shape of Tigger's abdomen that gave me the clue to the nature of his illness. His owner had brought him to see me because he was off his food and just did not seem to be quite right. He had also been sick the previous evening.

As I asked more about him, she told me that Tigger had seemed fine until about ten days earlier. On that day he had got up after his afternoon nap and gone out as usual, but failed to come back for his tea. Instead he had come back at midday the following day. He had seemed quiet and reluctant to move, but not obviously injured.

If she had looked closely, she might have noticed that his breathing was a little faster and shallower than usual. He had seemed better the next day and she had put the incident out of her mind until I started asking questions.

As I examined him, I discovered that his temperature was normal but that his gums were pale. I still had no clear idea of what was likely to be wrong until I picked up his front end and looked at the shape of his abdomen. Instead of the well-rounded tummy he ought to have had, he almost had a waist.

His chest sounds were not normal either. His heart and lungs both sounded muffled on the left side of his chest, and his breathing was faster and shallower than it should have been. I suspected that the reason he had developed a waist was that some of the organs that should have been in his abdomen were in fact in his chest.

On that first evening when he had not come home, he had almost certainly been in a road accident in which a car had driven over his abdomen, rupturing his diaphragm like an inflated paper bag. I explained my suspicions to his owner and told her that he would need an X-ray and probably an operation. My X-rays confirmed that he did have a ruptured diaphragm and that his stomach, liver and most of his intestines were in his chest.

Once I started to operate, it was hard to believe that he had been walking around with such terrible damage inside. It took nearly an hour to disentangle his heart and lungs from the other organs and stitch his diaphragm back together.

For the first two days after his operation he just lay on his heat pad while we fed him through a drip in his vein. On the third day he was well enough for me to take the drainage tube out of his chest. Once this was out he began to eat for himself and another two days later he was well enough to go home. He is back to his old self now, three weeks after the injury.

One of the big dangers with ruptured diaphragm is that the initial symptoms will go unnoticed and then the cat will become a medical time-bomb especially if they are given an anaesthetic.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.