Will Graham get her fur back?

by River Mon 19 Feb 2018, 9:01 pm

The wound near Grahams ear has fully healed, and it's now a bald scar from the ear to just below her chin. The other wound, on her back, is also healing, though it's still regenerating skin and sports a small but rather nasty hole.

Both were very deep wounds, going all the way through her her skin and fat. Will she ever get her fur back, or were the wounds too deep?

Also, as a side note, she turns two in just a months time!

by MerciToujoursMaPetiteBoop Tue 20 Feb 2018, 9:42 am

Very superficial skin wounds can heal through a process called "tissue regeneration", in which skin cells make more skin cells and patch up the damage to leave it looking like nothing happened -- no scar.

Here's a lightly edited excerpt from p. 14 of Wound Healing And Skin Integrity, edited by M. Flanagan MSc BSc CertEd RN, published in 2013 by Wiley-Blackwell (so you know I'm not just making it up!):

"If the injury extends deeper into the dermis, damage to its intricate structure, including the hair and sweat glands, cells, nerves, and blood and lymphatic vessels, results in the complex biological process known as tissue repair. The process of tissue repair replaces damaged or absent tissue and restores skin integrity, but the structure and function of the original tissue is lost as even a hair root is too complicated to rebuild."

Here's the disclaimer: The book quoted above is a reference for matters relating to human skin. Mouse skin should be mostly similar, but I do not jump directly to the conclusion that Graham's new skin cannot repopulate with some hairs. If traces of hair follicle remain, after all the clawing and cleaning and treating, they will probably try to resume their business.

There is also a pertinent article, viewable online, titled "Principles and mechanisms of regeneration in the mouse model for wound-induced hair follicle neogenesis" (Wang et al., in Regeneration, Volume 2 / Issue 4, August 2015, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.):

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/reg2.2015.2.issue-4/issuetoc

I hope that worked. What it means is that, even when full-thickness skin damage has occurred, researchers have found brand new hair follicle generation in the center of wounds. And this study was done with mice.

So, it is impossible to predict. If hair grows back, it probably won't look like it did before. You'll just have to watch and see what happens -- your own "lab experiment", except that you did not harm the test subject on purpose to see what would happen, and she probably gets a whole lot better treats and a whole lot more human kindness.

Will Graham get her fur back?

Will Graham get her fur back?

Re: Will Graham get her fur back?