Oh The Woes of a Cat

For Ashes, I'm sure, the past 3 weeks have been the worst adventure she's ever or will ever be on! It all started with what typically happens to a 6-7mth old female, she was sent to be spayed and declawed along with her sister Cinders. They spent a few days there and when I got them home, they were relieved. I watched them like a hawk the first couple of days, checking their incisions, and watching their paws. After a week, they were back to themselves, racing around the house with each other, battling it out at night. Until that is, that Friday where I had just finished talking to my neighbour about how perfectly they had healed up. I went to check on their incisions one last time, to make sure all is well, when I spotted something red on Ashes' leg. A hole was gaping on her inside hind leg. Quickly I searched the entire house, looking for signs of where she caught it on. I couldn't find anything. Trying to recall a moment where I may have heard her cry out in pain. I put her down for her to walk, and she did without favouring her leg which then made me suspicious. I called Christa (my wonderful babysitter, who is also a vet tech.) and asked if she would mind stopping in to look at her leg. She came with in 15 mins. She first thought the same I did, that Ashes impaled herself on something, but then we both looked really closely and noticed a small little hole that seemed to run deep. Christa immediately knew that this is probably where they injected Ashes with a needle to put her to sleep for her surgery. She told me to call the vet and have them look at it and fix it up. Christa also warned me that if they didn't agree that this is where the needle was, then I would be looking to pay $140 or more on this type of visit. After Christa left, I let the tears fall. It was the worst timing ever. We were to be leaving on our vacation the next day. We did not have that kind of money to be dropped at that time. I called the vet and they saw her that night. The vet did confirm what Christa had thought and so thankfully they cleaned her up, gave her an antibiotic injection and put a cone collar on her and sent me home with a cream that needed to be applied 2-3 times a day.

This meant our 11 yr. old neighbour couldn't watch the cats for us. So my sister said she would take them for the week. We loaded up for our holidays and packed the cats as well and dropped them off at my sister's house.

After the week had gone by we picked the cats up and got them home. But this is what her leg looked like after a week.

Not much healing took place, not that I could tell really. It looked clean and I was happy with it, but Christa came on Monday to look at her and was shocked when she saw it. She thought it was much too deep and sure it would heal on it's own, but would take months! She told me to take her back to the vet and let them make the call, since it was their fault. So I did. I still feared the cost of these visits, but again, thankfully they owned up to their error and have not charged me a thing. When the vet saw how deep it was, right away she told me that she would like to surgically correct it and could I bring back the next day. Tuesday morning, I carted Ashes off to the clinic again, I picked her up that afternoon and this is what her leg then looked like:
She was to continue to wear her cone collar and go back next Saturday to have the stitches removed. All was well until Wednesday afternoon when I caught her licking her butt with the cone collar still in place. Turns out the collar was too small, and the darn cat chewed one of her stitches out! I called the vet and they again took her right away. They didn't want to put the stitches back in because that would require them to put her under, so they stapled it (sounds awful) and put a bigger collar on. It was so big she could hardly lift her head. I again called Christa and she happened to be going into her work and she had lighter cones for cats. So we have that corrected and now she can actually move around. But yes, lets see if there is anything else in store for this poor kitty cat.

The cone of shame (taken from the movie Up)