A Cat's Tail

Do you want an update on the cat situation?! Really, you're not sick of it yet?! Ok, here goes.....

We have successfully moved four of the six cats out of the house. With a few hiccups.

One the third day of having them out, Max's Bear cat tried to follow Lee out of our storm door on the back mud porch. Which is great, he loves, loves being an outdoor kitty and was already pouncing on the mice in the barn the first afternoon!

Unfortunately Lee moves like the wind and Bear did not have enough time to get his entire body clear of the door. He must have been jumping through because when the door closed, it trapped his tail and left him hanging by it. At his first howl Lee flipped around to open the door, however, a cat hanging by his tail from a door is not about to take that calmly. As Lee tried to reopen the door the cat stuck his claws into Lee and proceeded to claw at him.

The door has been sticky for a couple of months and jamming a cat's tail in it, did nothing to help it! So Lee is pushing the cat off his leg with one hand and desperately trying to get the door open with the other. Mind you all this is over in less time it will probably take you to read this.

At the first howl I knew what had happened and happened to be right by the other door into the mud porch and sprinted to the storm door and could see what was happening in a flash. So now you have Lee yelling because the cat is clawing him and did bite him at one point, you have the cat screeching and howling and now I'm yelling at Lee to back off and let me open it from my side. Which he immediately does.

Once the tail is free the cat is GONE. I'm not too worried about him, I knew it was possible he had a pretty good injury, even a possible break to his tail, however I was more worried about Lee and not about to go track down a completely hacked off cat!

Oh and did I forget to tell you that Lee was headed out the door to help load the suburban with gear because we were supposed to be leaving.......yeah.

So now I have an injured kid, an injured cat and I have to leave to go get gas, then come back get the rest of the gang and then hit a chiro apt. and a ortho apt and some other errands.....

So I left Lee in Mom's capable hands and went and got gas.... it seems like there was some kind of timing or something that created this situation of me leaving and coming back, but of course I can't remember it. When I came back Mom has doctored Lee all up and he's hanging in there. I was most worried about the bite, I've heard bad things about bites around joints and the bite was close to his fingers. But it seemed shallow and Mom got lots of hydrogen peroxide on it. (and he healed just fine, no worries from any of the wounds!)

As we're finishing loading up, Lee comes to me with blood on his hands and tells me that Bear is bleeding all over.... Of course he is, cause we don't have enough to deal with! I catch the unhappy cat, have Than hold him with a towel over him. Look at his tail, decide it needs some clipping to truly asses it, and then yep.....he really needs to see the vet. It's all the way through the layers of skin and long enough that I don't see any way we're going to get it to heal well.

So I make phone calls to the vet and the chiro, arranging to drop the cat off on our way through town and still make our chiro apt and ortho apt. And after running all our errands and being on our way home, the vet calls and we can pick him up. Perfect timing!

The news was not perfect however. I was given one groggy, mad cat complete with a cone of shame around his neck and told that if we couldn't keep him from getting to his tail and chewing on it, we might have to amputate. Oh fun.

I get to put him in the bathroom, the bathroom I had just freed of cat litter two days before, the bathroom that I had put blood, sweat and almost tears into to polish it up. The bathroom I was hoping to take a bath in real soon. It has the only bathtub in it. I was soooo proud of that bathroom, proud enough that it might have been sinful. But the vet tech pointed out that a bathroom with a tub, where cleaning blood and vomit would be easier, was probably our best option. Oh joy.

Of course it only took him about 20 minutes of being free to get his cone of shame off. From there it was just a count down, the second time took 15, third was 10, fourth 5, and then he'd get it off as soon as we put him down. So we finally gritted our teeth and left it off. We did put lavender oil on it, which he licked and hated the taste of. So that seemed to help. We crossed our fingers and left it off all night and he did great.

In fact he didn't once chew on his tail the entire time he had his staples in, which by the way is what they used to close it back up with. Five staples in his little tail. Poor baby. I think it's possible that he had some nerve damage. We would completely forget he had an injury those first few days and pet him as normal and swipe our hands down his tail and he'd never react.

When I took him back for the removal, they were very impressed. They had expected him back. Cat tails are apparently tricky to get healed well as it's very hard (I think impossible) to keep them from reaching their tails if they are determined enough. So even though it was a traumatic experience, we lucked out and all is well that ends well.

Lee felt very horrible over it and was very sad the rest of the day. But it was a complete accident, no one did anything wrong, it just happened.

Bear was back outside within about three days after the injury. We couldn't keep him in easily and he was doing so well not chewing on it, we just let him go. Jetta discovered Mom was back complete with her soft heart and sweet talked her way in to staying in Mom's room at night. But now that Mom's back on the west coast, Jetta seems content to be an outside cat. We don't see much of her inside now.

The three orange outside cats want to be inside and in fact we did let them in and out freely for several weeks, but now we've got a peeing problem again. So I'm being pretty strict about who is where, hoping to narrow down the problem. We'll see.

That leaves Than's Sherbet (scaredy cat) in full time and Collin's Dandelion is still living in his room. She was a feral kitten (aprox. nine months) that Mom found outside one day last year. She too is a scaredy cat and so we're introducing her to the chaos that is our house a bit at a time. She's getting braver and has actually been outside the room a time or two, so that will come.

We decided it was too traumatic to transition Sherbert at the same time as the others, she was just too upset over it all. But I have caught her at the door a time or two thinking about it, so she may still try it out at some point. The others love their freedom and so far have stayed away from the road. They've even caught a mouse or two for us! They usually come back in to the basement at night and we are feeding them there twice a day. So they are still well looked after. They also have several litter boxes down there, much to the boy's chagrin. Guess who gets to clean litter boxes?!