The Situation

This was Charlie at the weekend, sleeping blissfully among the flowers. (And, y’know, stealing my wheelchair, but that’s just SOP for him these days. Stealing my tee-shirt too, was new, but eh, he knows red attracts humming birds so he really likes red.)

Flower Power

Then on Monday, just before midday, he came blamming in through the at door in a way that suggested some dire situation, and I found him lying on the floor, panting.

This is unusual for two reasons. Charlie never lies on the hardwood floor—George does, sometimes, but Charlie? Never!—and if you can see a cat panting, you know something is very wrong. (Dogs pant all the time; cats not so much.)

And in fact it was clear something was. He just looked terrible, and when he stood up, he limped. Please bear in mind that cats are great at masking; they will never show weakness unless they’re badly hurt (sometimes not even then). I cancelled my physical therapy appointment and set about figuring out the problem.

Eventually we discovered—well, Kelley did; I couldn’t really get to him properly—that he had two puncture wounds, one behind each shoulder. Cat immune systems are weird: their puncture wounds almost always abscess. That plus the degree to which he was truly freaked out added up to one thing: a visit to kitty ER.

The wound on his right shoulder was superficial; a quick clean, some antibiotics, and it was fine. The left not so much. Whatever had bitten him or driven its talons into him from above/behind had gone so deep it had driven fur way down into the muscle and made a hell of a mess. They put in an IV and put him out and went to work.

We finally got him home about 11 pm—doped on methadone and antibiotics, a shaved left leg (for the IVs), and an enormous sutured wound on his left shoulder, with a drain stitched in. And wearing the dreaded cone of shame.

There’s no cat on earth who likes wearing a cone—it interferes with their vision and, far worse, their whiskers. Charlie was supposed to stay still and not jump or run for a day or two, but when you add methadone to cone-confusion, well, things don’t go well.

At some point he got himself stuck under the bed, half-strangled. So we got him a doughnut to wear instead, or a ‘Zen-collar’. This is basically a tiny inflatable swimming ring that velcros round the neck—it doesn’t interfere with the whiskers but prevents the cleaning/attacking of the wound. But it turns out Charlie figured out how to get that off in jiffy, and before we had time to blink had the drain partially pulled out. On went the cone again while we made an emergency phone-around-the city-for-a-solution…which turned out to be something called a surgical suit.

We got two, slightly different sizes. Both intended for dogs. Both pull-on full-body stretch fabric. He didn’t need the full body (they’re designed for abdominal wounds—such as the stapling after being spayed) so we cut them both down to long tee-shirt size.

He was not a fan of the first:

Been Down So Very Damn Long…

I think it was a bit small. But it did the job—kept his teeth away from that drain.

However, the nature of drains is to, well, drain. So we had to change the suit on a regular basis and clean around the drain, etc. We swapped to a different suit, called a Suitical. It was a bit looser but he was becoming progressively more unhappy.

Suiticals suck

It’s hard watching a small beast look at you as though he’s been betrayed. And when he’s too dopey (now on buprenorphine) and queasy (amoxicillin) to even be cross.

So it was perversely delightful when he started to get really irritated.

Rage, rage against the moms

The delight became less delightful when he started to just go bonkers, really trying to go after that drain under the suit. We assumed it was just itching as things healed—and the wound looked good when we changed the suit—but then his behaviour got weird. We stopped the buprenorphine. It got really weird. We weren’t sure if it was itching, pain from infection, or the suit rubbing on the wound or what…

After going back and forth yesterday we decided we needed to get him looked at by the vet. And by back and forth I mean it: yesterday was our wedding anniversary; we were supposed to go out for a lovely dinner. But we both understood we’d just fret the whole time about the damn cat, so we agreed: cancel the dinner, take Charlie back to kitty ER.

And to be clear, often in these posts when I say ‘we’ I really mean Kelley: MS renders it difficult for me to do a lot of practical things. So Kelley took him to the ER and I opened a beer and watched a film I’d seen so many times before it didn’t matter that I couldn’t concentrate on it. (Happy Anniversary to us, sigh.)

At the vet, it turned out Charlie was healing so well we could get the drain out a couple of days early. Yay! So now we could switch to a less restrictive suit—all it had to do was stop him getting his teeth to the sutures.

And this is what we found:

Purple Haze

We thought perhaps a flower-power style hippy tie-dyed suitical might improve his mood. But, eh, well, not so much:

Mood Indigo

Things, of course, continue to improve—at least from our perspective. He still doesn’t like it, but this time it’s looser, this time we don’t have to keep changing it—because the wound is sealed and not leaking—so this time he’s just going to have to lump it for a few days. He is, of course, pissed off:

Good Kitty Gone Bad

The wound on his right shoulder is already basically gone. The bald patch on his shaved shin—which makes him looks a bit like a poodle (sssshh, don’t tell him)—will of course grow back. And as I say , the major wound is well on the way to healing.

The sutures are supposed to stay in for another week. My guess? It won’t have to be that long. But of course we’ll check as often as the (by now truly cross) wounded warrior will let us, and as soon as they start to get that loose look, well, we’ll either take him back to the vet for removal or do it ourselves. (We’ve done that before.)

So What Happened?

So what happened? We don’t know. It’s puzzling. He has two matching wounds on either shoulder—far too wide apart to be another cat. Plus I didn’t hear cat-fight sounds—and we always hear the cat fights. Besides, in my experience cat bites are almost always near the face or chest—the front of the cat—or on the legs. So if not a cat, then what? If it had happened at night my guess would have been he nearly got taken by a barred owl. Could an owl have done this? Oh, yes. Charlie weighs just under 10 pounds; a neighbour’s dog—a sheltie (and shelties can weigh up to 20 lbs)—got snatched right in front of her a few years ago. Fortunately the dog fell out of its clutches as it shifted grip—but it had horrible wounds and had to go the vet. So maybe it was an owl but I’ve never seen a barred owl hunt in full daylight before. There again, it’s been a bountiful summer, so perhaps the owls had two broods this year and many fledgelings to feed and that forced a change in usual patterns.

It could have been a raccoon, I suppose, but the placement of the wounds doesn’t seem quite right, and—again—full daylight. Raccoons tend to be crepuscular hunters, when they do hunt. But they generally prefer easier prey than a muscly, fit and fighty cat.

Coyotes of course hunt all the time—but a) we usually hear them, and b) if a coyote had got its jaws on Charlie, he would not have lived to tell the tale. Plus we didn’t hear any dogs barking—and dogs have a tendency to lose their shit when raccoons or coyotes are around.

Over on Patreon (where I posted this first—paying customers get news 24 hrs early) several patrons have mooted the possibility of an eagle. Yes, it’s possible—bald eagles and osprey do live around here and they do operate in daylight—but I don’t think it’s likely. Those two eagles don’t like to hunt under the trees—and it’s nothing but trees around here. Some hawks, however, do hunt in the woods. There again, it would have to be a pretty big hawk to make an attempt on an experienced and fast 10 lb cat. If anyone knows what kind of hawks live around here (near Carkeek Park), I’d love to hear your thoughts.

In the end, then, it’s a mystery. I’m just glad he’ll be fine—we’re all no worse for wear other than a couple of thousand dollars of vet bills and a couple of weeks of being terrorised by a seriously pissed off kitty who does not understand why he has to wear hippy drag and very definitely doesn’t know why we’re being so mean and discriminatory and letting his brother out but not him…

Addendum

Do not suggest we keep our cats indoors. In terms of human-made dangers, this is one of the safest places in the world for a small predator: a cul-de-sac in an already quiet neighbourhood that dead-ends in a ravine that runs down to a park that is on Puget Sound. Yes, there are natural dangers—but our cats are creatures of nature, born to live outside. They are happier and essentially healthier being able to come and go during the day (we try keep them in at night) as they please. We’re not going to change that, and it just irritates me when people get sanctimonious about it. This is your only warning.