Poor Foxxy
Buddy… one day I discovered that his ear was simply inflated with blood or ‘something’. I should have known something was
wrong. Foxxy had given up his usual
sleeping place and was wondering around trying place after place… trying to get
comfortable. I thought that he may have
been a bit distraught over the sudden death of Betty, the House’s Alpha Cat,
though I did wonder about that, as Foxxy never showed much affection for
her (her sudden death may have caused him to be more anxious, in such a way that he would scratch at his ears more than normally... a Hematoma of the ear is caused by the rupturing of blood vessel within the cartilage of the ear but without a corresponding tear in the skin surrounding the ear that would allow the blood to drain). Anyway, once discovered, and
finding that he found his ear quite sensitive to the touch, I took Foxxy to my
usual Veterinary Service, and their
treatment protocol was to drain the hematoma, stitch up the ear to close it up,
and to tell me to bring Foxxy back in 10 days to get the stitches taken out.
Well,
because of a tropical storm moving through the Islands at the time, the 10 days
was changed to 13. But several days
after Foxxy had his stitches removed, his ear had puffed up again.
Instead of
going back the same Vet, for ‘warranty work’, I went to a different Veterinary
Service. The first thing the New Doctor,
and old man, found was that it was no longer a simple Hematoma… an ear full of
blood… no, it was an Abscess –an ear full of puss and infection. He had never seen that before. Anyway, the New Doctor’s Treatment plan was
to drain the air, but to stitch it up with a backing material to support the
ear… he used X-Ray Film. He left a huge
hole in the skin in the inside of the ear (more than a half of inch long, and a
bit more than a eighth of an inch wide), so that the wound could drain, and he
gave me instructions to clean the drainage… to clean off the scab… twice a day,
and to put some antiseptic yellow stuff on the wound, and to do that until the
ear seemed to have stopped draining and begun to heal. Also, I was told to give Foxxy some antibiotics,
orally, to stop whatever infection there was at its source. And I
was not to bring Foxxy back for stitch removal for 20 days… twice the protocol
of the first Veterinary Service I had gone to.
Lessons
learned in all of this. If your kitty’s
ear is operated on, you shouldn’t have to be told to put antibiotics on the
healing wound… using Neosporin on Foxxy’s ear, although nobody told me to do it,
might have saved Foxxy another trip to the Vet.
Also, 10 days did not seem so much time to heal… not even 13.
Oh, when the
New Doctor removed the X-Ray film from the top of Foxxy’s ear, well, it looked
red and infected and horrible. I had my
doubts about that part of Foxxy’s treatment.
But the Doctor went out into his garden and clipped me off some actual aloe
vera leaves, and instructed me to freshly break the leaves section by section
and to smear the aloe vera juices on Foxxy’s ear. Well, even by the next day, Foxxy’s ear was
looking so much better.
But I am a
bit concerned about the short glaze of fur that coats a cat’s ear. Foxxy’s ear now looks a bit like bare skin,
and I do hope that a new layer of fur glaze will grow up on his ear.
Foxxy’s ear
now droops, like a dogs… no longer standing up like a cat’s ear. That is a bit sad, and also a bit
ironic. You see, if you remember, Foxxy’s
full name is Foxxy Buddy, named after another ‘Buddy’ cat I had known who would
always cock his ears down, like Star War’s Yoda, and Foxxy Buddy would do the
same when I first met him. Well, now,
Poor Foxxy has no choice about it in regards to one of his ears.
But he now is doing
okay. He had hated the Treatment. But now that the Treatment is over, he has
re-initiated all of his old Quality Time Rituals, and then some… reaching out
to Bond with me a little extra, after what must have been quite an ordeal for
him.
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