In the Media 2004

Hospital dines out on frog's leg operation
11 June 2004
The Courier Mail, page 3
By: Glenis Green

In France they eat them, but at Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast they prefer them alive and hopping.

Which is why a very dedicated team at the Zoo’s animal hospital has performed what could be a world first – operating and pinning the smashed hind leg of a green tree frog. The delicate two-hour surgery was carried out on the frog’s broken femur about a month ago by the Steve Irwin Conservation Foundation Koala and Wildlife Hospital’s veterinarian Jon Hanger and the hospital’s manager and nurse Gail Gipp.

Ms Gipp said the wild frog had been rushed to the hospital by a distraught Glasshouse Mountains woman who had accidentally crushed it in her door jamb. “There was a lot of swelling and bruising so we gave him pain relief and waited two days for the swelling to go down,” she said.

“He had a broken arm too and we put a cast on that, but he took it off himself within 24 hours.” Ms Gipp said the task of fixing the frog’s leg was more complex. “He was very small and our equipment was very big,” she said. “After a lot of thought we used part of a spinal needle to place the pin in his leg. He was using it the next day.”

Ms Gipp said the frog, which they had aptly nicknamed 'Doorjamb,' took to his hospital food of 'pinkie mice' with such gusto he had gained an extra 9g over his admission weight of 50g. He even managed a premature escape attempt, which had Ms Gipp in her pyjamas crawling around all possible hiding places at 5am trying to find him. He was eventually discovered clinging to a branch in a pile of koala leaf litter, 20m from his cage.

Ms Gipp said while the hospital had treated more than 500 animals since it opened in January, Doorjamb was its most unusual patient. She said he would be released back into the wild when he was fully recovered and the surgical pin would probably be left in place.

“He’s hopping everywhere now,” she said.