Recent surgeries

Cosmetic parotid salivary duct injury

Horses always seem to getting in to trouble by wounding themselves. For most people getting the wound to heal is the only important thing in treatment, a bit of scarring doesn’t matter. But for a minority of show horses getting an unsightly scar or splint is career ending. This show horse managed to get himself a small injury on the right jaw line. Unfortunately it cut the parotid (main) salivary duct into the mouth. After it healed it left him with a big unsightly swelling on the corner of the jaw. One vet had already had a go at repair, but because the saliva kept coming back the lump came back just the same as before.

Horses can cope very well with only one parotid salivary gland, therefore the first stage of treatment was to stop the gland producing saliva, which was going nowhere. We carried this out by injecting a sterile saline solution containing formaldehyde, then leaving it in place for a minute, then draining it out.

After 2 treatments, the lump had reduced in size massively, becoming a hard fibrous mass. Ultrasound showed that there was no more fluid inside, so it was safe to perform the second stage cometic scar revision surgery. This was carried out under a short general anaesthesia.

The horse recovered well and went home 3 days later. When he came back for stitches out, the site looked perfect. He went on to make a full recovery and nobody would ever know that he had the original injury.

We carry out a significant number of cosmetic scar revision surgeries at Cotts every year. If you want advice on whether it might be possible to improve a scar on your animal, please contact Cotts, preferably with email photographs of the scar, to enable us to give you advice.