Injured Cat (update--this is a long one)

I decided it would be a good idea to blog about the recent kitty cat drama, just to keep you all informed. If you’ve already heard this and are sick of hearing me talk about the cat, feel free to stop reading. I’m just putting the story down in one place so I don’t necessarily have to rehash the details every time someone asks.

The short version is this: Obie broke his foot yesterday. We discovered it yesterday morning. It requires expensive surgery and 6 weeks of recovery, during which he’ll be confined to a crate 24 hours a day.

The long version (aka “whole story with all the gory details”) is this: Yesterday morning I was feeding the cats and noticed that Obie was being more vocal than usual. He usually meows while I’m getting his food, just because he’s fat and greedy and hungry, so I didn’t think much of it. But when I turned around, I noticed he was walking more slowly than usual, and that he wasn’t putting much weight (any weight, after closer examination) on his back left foot. I got him to lie down so I could look at it more closely—his foot was definitely swollen and there was a red line (for lack of a better word) running up the side of his ankle. I thought it looked like a cut, but I didn’t see any blood, so I was confused. Craig looked at it and said “I think he’s broken something…”

I dropped him off at the vet on my way to work. They said they’d take X rays and give me a call. I asked, “So, if it is broken, what happens?” She told me that most of the time they can just wrap it or cast it, but that depending on the type of break, it could require surgery (to put pins in the bone), which would be significantly more expensive. Okay, I thought—we’ll wait and see. How bad could it be?

:Sidenote: So how did this happen, you ask? Well, since we didn’t actually witness it, we can only speculate, but we have enough information (both from past experience and from the scene of the crime) to put together a fairly accurate guess. First, we know that Obie likes to play on the stairs. We’ve seen him do this, sticking his whole body through a gap, wrapping himself around a stair. As well, twice we have witnessed him fall through the gaps onto the basement steps below (no injuries—just a thud and then he was up and playing again). He’s clumsy, and he doesn’t learn from his mistakes. So, we assumed that his injury was stair-related in some way. Secondly, Craig found a clump of white hair on the railing going down the basement steps (this still makes me cringe). Deduction: he must have hit his leg on the railing as he fell, which would explain why he’d never injured himself during any previous falls, but managed to break something this time. Lastly, the clump of hair was on the inside of the railing (as in, toward the wall). Based on this (and the X-ray results, which I’ll get to soon), I think he probably fell, caught his foot behind the railing, while the rest of his body continued to fall on the other side of the railing, and…well…*snap* :end sidenote:

So, the vet’s office called me during lunch and asked permission to sedate him for the X rays. They said he was “very aggressive,” which I thought was super odd for him—he’s not at ALL aggressive. But he’s not really a fan of the vet’s office, in general, plus I figured he was in a lot of pain. So, whatever—sure, drug him if that’s what you need to do to get the X rays.
Later that afternoon, the doctor called me to give me the results of the X rays. I could hear the concern in his voice right away. “Yeah…this is a pretty bad fracture…” Obie’s tibia (shin bone) was dislocated from his ankle, and his fibula (the other, skinnier bone) was fractured in three places. He said that if it was just an issue of the bones being broken, it wouldn’t be a big deal (“The joke with cats is, put two bones in a room together and they’ll heal.”). However, the dislocation had probably caused some significant ligament damage, which isn’t something he could fix at that office. “He’s going to need to see a specialist.”

I called Craig, upset, and explained the situation. He probably needed surgery. It would probably be expensive. The vet wants us to take him to an animal emergency room. We both needed to leave work early and take care of this asap.

We went to the vet and they showed/explained the X rays to us—one word: “ouch.” When they brought Obie out to us, he was very upset. If you’ve ever been near a feral cat or heard a wicket cat fight, he was making similar noises. Yowling, hissing, spitting, screaming—there isn’t an adequate word for the tortured sounds that were issuing from his carrier. I think I started crying again. They said he was just in a lot of pain (even with the pain meds they’d given him). Later, at the animal hospital (when he started freaking out again in the waiting room), they said he might also be disoriented from the anesthesia (remember, they had to knock him out in order to x-ray his leg)—I knew that this sometimes happened to people when waking up from anesthesia, but apparently it happens to cats, too. I think this was one of the more upsetting things for me, just listening to him scream like that and not being able to do anything for him.

So, they checked him in at the animal ER and we waited to see a doctor (he started flipping out in the waiting room, so they came and took him to the back. A very sweet nurse came out periodically to tell me how he was doing, that he had settled down and was comfortable, etc.).
When we finally got to see the doctor, she explained that we had two options: the first (and best) was surgery. The second (and cheaper) was to just cast his leg and see how it heals. Given the potentially significant ligament damage, surgery was definitely the best option, and just putting a cast on it would bring several risks that we weren’t sure we were willing to take (such as the risk that it wouldn’t heal properly, that it would have to be re-cast if it moved or came off, and basically the fact that if it didn’t “take” the first time and we decided to do surgery later on, scar tissue would have developed enough that the surgery would be more complicated and possibly less effective than if they just did it now). Plus, the “cheaper” cast option wasn’t exactly cheap anyway (over $1000 in the end). It looked like we were going to have a big fat bill regardless, unless we just decided to put him down (which she didn’t even mention and we weren’t going to consider, anyway). So, we decided to go with the surgery. We may have to sell our firstborn son to pay for it, but it’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make.

So, that’s where we are right now. They kept him overnight and did the surgery today. They called Craig earlier today and said that the surgery went really well. We might pick him up tonight, or they might keep him another night, depending on how he is when he wakes up.
Besides the expense, another difficult thing (which should have occurred to me earlier, but didn’t somehow) is that recovery time is going to be about six weeks, during which he will need to be crated. Like, 24 hours a day. My big, active, socialite cat is going to be confined to a cage for six weeks. This will be very interesting indeed.

Remember the electrical burn drama from last fall? (btw, we finally concluded that the burn was the result of Obie licking an outlet, not chewing on a cord. There were no chewed cords anywhere in the house, and we had witnessed him licking electric outlets in the past) We laughed about that in the ER waiting room yesterday, as we were filling out paperwork and came across a question asking “Has your pet had any serious injuries in the past two years? If yes, explain.” I remember thinking that was drama…that was nothing compared to this.

Amanda’s blog recently asked “Why do we love cats so much?” I am asking that question myself this week…asking it all the way to the bank!

(And ShanNON, if you’re still reading, did you notice my careful use of the words X ray, X-ray, and x-ray? Each with their own special spelling, punctuation, and part of speech? You can check the Style Manual, but I think I used them correctly each time.)