__SANIBEL -- They knew before going in that the bobcat's right hind leg would not be pretty.
__But when orthopedic surgeon Bo Kagan made the incision at Care and Rehabilitation of Wildlife (CROW), it was worse than they'd anticipated.
__The 1-year-old male cat had been hit by a car about three weeks ago near Ortiz Avenue, and its right thighbone splintered like a dry twig.
__The medical term for the injury is a comminuted supracondylar femural fracture; Kagan simply called it horrible.
__“It's just a mess in here,” Kagan said looking at the jagged bone fragments jumbled up in the animal's muscle tissue. “We're certainly taking this little guy's leg apart, aren't we?”
__To repair the bobcat's leg, Kagan and surgical technician Walt Smith volunteered their time, and Columbia Regional Medical Center donated the use of more than $100,000 in equipment.
__CROW, a nonprofit organization dedicated to injured wildlife, never could afford such a procedure, staff veterinarian Chris Kreuder said.
__A 1-year-old bobcat should weigh 25 pounds; when the injured cat came to CROW 10 days ago, it weighed 11 pounds.
__“He was beyond emaciated,” Kreuder said. “He had no muscle. You could press his abdomen and feel his backbone. His liver was out of whack. Everything was out of whack.”
Kreuder and veterinary intern Michelle Bowman twice had operated on the cat to make immediate repairs, but the shattered thighbone was beyond their ability.
__Enter Kagan and Smith.
__When a bone is broken, a hard substance called callus forms at the fracture in the attempt to reunite the parts. The first step Monday was to scrape the callus off the bone and a handful of bone fragments, which Kagan removed from the animal's leg.
__Then Kagan had to decide whether to fit the fragments back into place or try something else.
__“Here's our problem: We're getting multiple, multiple pieces” Kagan said. “It's a jigsaw puzzle, guys. The question is what goes where?
__“Here's a big old piece that looks like it wants to go on the top there. But there are so many pieces that it's hard to tell.”
Another problem with a broken bone is that the muscles contract, and the limb becomes shorter than it's supposed to be.
__So Kagan measured the cat's other femur and then stretched the injured leg to the same length.
An hour into the procedure, Kagan screwed a long, narrow stainless steel plate into the upper and the lower parts of the thighbone and fit the fragments back in the gap.
__Although the repaired femur isn't continuous bone, callus will form around the fragments and the bone will regenerate.
Unfortunately, the plates used in this kind of surgery are made for humans, whose bones are larger than a bobcat's, so Smith had to modify what they had to make it fit.
__Thirty minutes later, Kagan tied surgical suture around the plate and bone to help keep everything in place, which is not the best technique because the suture can cut off the blood flow.
__“But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do,” Kagan said.
__After a little more than two hours, Kagan closed the incision.
__“That was tough,” he said. “We have a saying: ‘You always have more pieces than there are.’ There were certainly more than it looked like on the X-ray, and they were badly displaced, not where they should be.”
__The cat will spend the next month in an indoor cage and then be moved to an outdoor enclosure where it will undergo physical therapy.
__If everything goes well, it will be released into the wild.
“After seeing this surgery, I'd say his chances of release are 60 to 70 percent,” Kreuder said. "Before the surgery, they were zero.
__“He's eating double what he normally would, so in six months we should release a big, beefy cat that will have no problem catching food or dodging those cars.”

Story by Kevin Lollar of the Fort Myers News-Press