Cat Emergency

Got a call last night as I was driving home from a daylong excursion to Ikea with a friend. J. was frantically needing to know where to take the cat for an emergency. The stupid dog had bitten him when he wandered too close to her food dish. The food dish she refuses to actually eat out of but merely guards all day waiting for just this type of situation.

She bit him on the head, and one of her teeth pierced and broke his hard palate and his nose. He had blood coming out of his nose and was having a hard time breathing. And I was an hour or more away still.

J. took him to an emergency vet hospital not too far from where we live where they stabilized him and operated on him in the night. When I called this morning they said it went well and he was doing great, and I went and picked him up a couple of hours ago. He is indeed doing very well considering what he's been through. He is as I type this curled up on the desk between me and the keyboard, purring and snoozing, with his head in the crook of my right elbow and one paw stuck in the v-neck of my shirt.

He is lucky not to have lost an eye, evidently he got nailed on the cheekbone or something because his eye is all pink and weepy and a bit swollen around it but no damage to the eyeball at all. He had a laceration on his upper lip that had to be sutured as well. We have to feed him gold-plated finely ground endangered species in a can (judging from the price anyway) for four to six weeks to keep him from putting any pressure on his palate while it heals. And I get to squirt pain medicine into his mouth (which he loves) and antibiotics also (not loving so much) every twelve hours.

As for the dog. Well, if I'd been home there wouldn't be any dog, I was that mad. Our dogs have dominance issues and the smaller one particularly so. She's been pulling this dog dish trick for years, but she lulls us into a false sense of security by slacking off about it for weeks, months at a time. Then she nails a passing cat. She has attacked our other cat twice; the first time we had to take the cat to the vet because we were worried about broken ribs (there were none but she was very bruised up and swollen for some time) and the second time she got a good sized tuft of hair out of her.

This dog will now have ten minutes to eat, in a closed room where no cat can wander past the dish, and that's it. Chances are good she won't eat for a while until she gets the hang of this new procedure but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. She won't starve. She's lucky she's never looked at the baby cross-eyed or she wouldn't be living here anymore.

How I knew the cat would survive: within twenty minutes of getting home, he was licking his butt. :)