A four-year-old female neutered Burmese cat with a taste for adventure made headlines this month after sustaining massive injuries secondary to “high rise syndrome”. The apartment-dwelling cat, named Akira, fell off a window ledge, plunging eight floors onto a driveway late on a Saturday night.

“She was just lying there sort of splattered on the driveway,” owner April Twyford told The Daily Telegraph. “She actually left a bit of a mark when we scraped her up.”

Akira presented to the Veterinary Specialist Centre at North Ryde with extensive injuries, including a mild pneumothorax and lung contusions, haematuria, non-displaced fractures of both temporomandibular joints, a luxated left elbow, bilateral metacarpal fractures, subluxation of the right carpometacarpal joints and a small chip on her caudal glenoid. The VSC’s team of emergency vets worked around the clock to stabilise Akira before surgery.

According to surgeon Martin Havlicek, high rise syndrome is a not an uncommon presentation at specialist centres like the VSC.

“We see them fairly frequently, the injuries depend on the height of the fall as well as whether they land on concrete or in bushes, sometimes they hit a window ledge.”

Common injuries include head trauma, fracture of the hard palate, mandibular and maxillary fractures and pulmonary contusions.

What was unusual about Akira was the combination of metacarpal fractures with palmar luxation of the carpometacarpal bones. Continue reading Specialist team save victim of high rise syndrome