That sounds like a similar injury. Our vet said to amputate when he no longer uses it so he doesn’t have to drag a useful leg around. We think he is around 5 years old, but don’t really know for sure. His teeth were in bad shape which seemed odd for a younger cat.
Our poor feral cat was attacked badly and a bone in his toe broken. We’ve already paid 2k in emergency vet fees X-rays and splint changes. It might not heal together but surgery with a pin just isn’t in the cards. The vet said cats can heal and adapt to so much. Hopefully your kitty does ok 
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He’s very hard to take pictures of because he is so, so dark. He has the most beautiful black fur.
Here’s a picture when he was just a like ‘squeak.
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Cats are amazingly adaptable. I’ve known of several amputees among my friends’ critters who got along famously.
That said, an old fracture doesn’t always hurt, though this might be the exception. My Dad’s one cat was named (by him) Trouble. Trouble turned up tucked into the entryway of his store one morning trying to shelter in bad weather. He shooed her off, and he noted she was walking three legged as she left. Next day, she was tucked in the door again when he was opening, so he picked her up, took her to the stock room, put her in a box, and gave her a can of tuna from the shelves. She was skin and bones, and he could see when he picked her up that she had her fourth leg, but it was not working. It was folded back to her chest and did not move, never came near the ground, kind of like if you touched your opposite collarbone with one of your arms and just left it stuck there.
Dad was going to take her to the shelter that afternoon on his way home. He said she licked the tuna juice out of the can but didn’t eat the tuna. On the way to the shelter, there was a wreck and a traffic jam, and he was sitting waiting, so he was looking at the cat in the box, and he thought, nobody is going to want to adopt this cat. She was filthy. So when traffic started up again, he stopped at a vet along the way, explained her story to them, and asked if they could just wash her and get her looking nicer so she could be adopted. The vet agreed and said come back and get her tomorrow.
Dad returned the next day for the cat. They had washed her (a very pretty calico under the dirt), but she went into shock and full cardiac arrest at the end of the bath. They resuscitated her. She was absolutely skin and bones, very malnourished, he said. One of the staff at the clinic stayed there with her all night to keep her company, and they had her on IVs through the night. They also did full x-rays on her folded-up leg. The vet said that was a severe fracture/dislocation, and from the mechanism, he said that the cat had been thrown with force at one point, using that leg as a handle. This injury was months old, and the leg had actually healed and fused that way. He said testing with probes and such gave no response at all, and she did respond to touch elsewhere, so she wasn’t just being frozen from fear. He didn’t think the cat was in pain; he thought the nerves had been killed in the injury. He said the malnutrition was her worst problem; she was too weak to even eat. He told Dad the cat was going to die, to just take her home and wrap her up, and she would die in a day or two, but at least she would know care and warmth for her final hours.
Dad was listening to this recitation of 24 hours of extensive testing and care, and his thoughts were ramping up like a gas pump. “How much do I owe you?” he asked with fear. The vet looked at him and said, “$10.” Dad paid him $10 and took the cat home to die. The cat never got the memo. Stepmom fed her broth and juices, and she started picking up. When they took her back for a recheck two weeks later, she had at least doubled her weight. Dad, a lifelong non cat person, named her Trouble, and of course, she wasn’t going to the shelter.
Trouble lived on for nine years until she got cancer. She could run, climb, jump, wrestle, and discipline the dog, whom she immediately set up rule over. In all of that, the leg was folded up, not even touching the ground. They asked about amputation, and the vet checked it many times. She had no feeling in it and gave no signs of pain, including vital signs. She was totally Dad’s cat, and he held her and petted her as she was put to sleep at the end with her cancer. He never in all the years had another cat and still insists he doesn’t like cats.
But that was a severe but fused old fracture dislocation that the cat lived very actively with for nine years, and it never seemed to bother her. Your mileage may vary, of course. Best wishes to Thor.
Dad and Trouble. I love this picture. Trouble is perfectly content, at “home.” Dad is sitting there like, “I’m not responsible for the fact that there’s a cat on my lap. I do not like cats. This isn’t what it looks like.” Yeah, Dad, we know.
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My former cat vet said that there is an old saying vets use with cats: if both halves of the bone are in the same room, there’s a good chance it will heal.
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I had a barn cat decades ago that broke a bone in his paw. After a couple of attempts at keeping the splint on, the vet finally just taped the whole thing right to his fur! Not ideal I guess, but as long as he kept it dry (he did) it stayed on for the duration. I can’t remember how long he was in the splint as was around 40 years ago, but I do remember stopping by the barn in the morning before commuting to work and “turning him out” for the day! The barn was only 5 minutes from home and I was there every day, so I’d put him in the back room of the farmhouse at night and let him out for the day. It worked and he was sound, although I did get a tube of hairball remedy from the vet to take care of the shed hair after the splint came off!
ETA: that’s a nasty break! I guess they can’t just line the bones up under a light anesthetic, splint the thing and see how it goes?
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That’s what they did they sedated him fully tried to get it to line up better and splinted it. It’s been 2 weeks and 3 days they said the bones shifted slightly and don’t show that they’re going to together yet. He’s keeping the splint on well so they left it. They’ll recheck every 2 weeks.
The other vet said if there was no healing at 2 weeks we’d have to surgically have a pin put in but financially that’s just really not feasible.
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Good luck! I hope that some sort of callous forms on the bone to stabilize it and minimize the pain it must be causing.
I just wanted to update here. At 4 weeks our kitty showed very little healing of the bone. At 6 weeks he took the splint off again and had a week before his next appt. He wasn’t putting much weight on the paw and we were worried. I worked with a local natural path/nutritionist and we put him on a homeopathic treatment for bone knitting. He stopped limping two days later. At his checkup today the vet can’t even find where the break was on X-ray. She actually xrayed all 4 paws just to make sure 100% It’s honestly a miracle. Here are the before and after X-rays
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That’s fantastic! And amazing!
Excellent!
What a great update!
Glad to see it worked. One of the barn cats has a cast up his entire back leg for a broken paw/leg. Almost a week down for Amos.
