Cat Maintenance

Every time I try to write this entry, something else happens.

Last Sunday, while my mother-in-law was visiting, we had let the cats outside to run around. Usually this is not much of a problem; at worst they would bring us back injured mice or birds and let them loose in the house. But this day, my wife noticed that Les, our boy cat, was ferociously cleaning one spot on his belly. When she approached him, he ran away, which is very uncharacteristic. Eventually she got a look at him and saw a huge gash, and came running to get me. I attempted to pick him up which provoked a violent response, but my wife was able to coax him into his carrier with the promise of catnip. I called our usual vet, who was expectedly closed. I didn't listen to the full instructions and ended up calling the local 24/7 emergency vet hospital. They told me to bring Les in, where they cleaned out the wound, gave him antibiotics, gave us three days' of pain medication, and put him in an e-collar.

Unfortunately, the antibiotics did not prevent the stitches from getting infected. Two days later, my wife noticed swelling and redness in the shaved area and thus she brought him to the Feline Hospital in Salem. They reopened the stitches and kept him for 4 days. This past Saturday, we watched the vet bandage the huge, gaping, bloody hole in our cat, then brought him home. He was fine most of the night afterwards, except at one point, when he got spooked by his bandage and flipped out.

This flipping out occurred again the next morning. Les actually managed to pull out a gauze pad from under another layer of gauze AND a layer of Vetrap while jumping and flipping and slamming his head into the footboard of our bed. We called the vet again, this time listening to the entire message and beeping her. When she called us back, she told us to bring him in for rebandaging.

This morning, after I left for work, he once again managed to tear out the pad. He's at the hospital now, and he's staying until they suture him back up tomorrow.