This weekend, I spent a sum total of five-and-a-half hours at a pet hospital. My cat developed a hole in her side that I needed to get fixed.
The short story is this: Pippin, who is three months shy of being 21 years old, developed an abscess on her side. It had been there for a while, according to the vet, and it suddenly opened on Saturday. Panicked, and finding that nearly every vet in the area was closed, I ended up going to the vet school at the U.
They patched her up, drugged her up (a lot), but otherwise deemed her in remarkably good health for a cat of her age–her heart is still strong sounding; blood work came back mostly normal, only showing some diminished kidney function, but they think that’s due to her discomfort from the last few days of not eating or drinking much; her eyes are fairly clear; her coat is healthy; and the only real strike on her is that she’s a bit thinner than she should be. So she’s good, except for the hole in her side.
So, to spare you the gruesome details, they had to clean up the abscess, remove some dead tissue around it, and in the end, between the tissue they had to take out and the fact that there’s a still some infection there that we’re treating with the antibiotic, they can’t close the wound quite yet. But when she was in today for the changing of the bandage, they said things are progressing nicely for just a day and when she’s in next on Tuesday, we’ll decide on how to close it–stitches or just close on its own.
It’s been funny, all things considered, when I’ve gotten her home now the last two days, that she’s been coming off of some sedative, and has staggered around the house desperate to eat and drink. This afternoon, she was drunkenly chasing her food dish around her tray for a while, as her hind legs started sliding in opposite directions out from under her. The kids have found it a bit amusing. I’ve been tense. Well, let me be fully honest, all of the kids, Patrick in particular, have been concerned. But watching her has been kind of entertaining.
She’s got a kind of floppy vinyl cone around her neck, that no matter how much I pull it forward over her head, she manages to get it pushed back so it’s more over her body. So I just stopped trying. Maybe I’ll get a picture of that and put it up later.
In the meantime, I get to worry about paying for that hospital visit, and about Jenni, who got to exhaust herself this weekend with about 18 hours of class, which will lead up to her May graduation. But it doesn’t help that she’s been fighting a cold or flu or something that doesn’t seem to want to let go. So I’ve got two of my favorite women in the world having medical issues…On a stressful weekend…
Sigh.
See you tomorrow.