While I was in New York, our family moved to a new house. At some point during this transition, our cat JJ got some sort of sores on his face, most likely from fighting some other animal, and so we were a little worried about him. He had scratched all of the fur off of the left side of his face and there were clearly some big wounds there.
Luckily (or so we thought) they healed up pretty quickly over the next week or two and his fur started growing back and we forgot about it, more or less. Then, last week, my wife told me that she had noticed some fluid building up in his face where the sores had been. I checked him out, and sure enough his face was all swollen with what appeared to be a lot of fluid under there. We figured it was time to find a new vet in our new town.
But I didn’t get around to it that day, or the next day…or the next day. He seemed fine except for the swelling, and I was busy unpacking and dealing with the rest of life. But then on Thursday I noticed a horrible trail of blood leading all over my house. The swelling had burst open and his face was leaking everywhere. He looked kind of like a zombie cat, and he was definitely not feeling well. Time to find a vet, stat.
I flew to google maps and quickly called the closest vet to my house, and they were able to see him right away. I knew he was super sick because he did not claw my face off when I put him into his cat carrier. He did meow sadly at me though. When we got there I learned something new about cats, which I will now pass on to you. Cats’ skin heals ridiculously quickly, and so when they get a cut, often times it will heal up with bacteria in there, which is what happened to us. We thought it was great that he had healed up right away, but in fact it was not great.
Long story short, he’s fine. He had a very high temperature and was pretty sick, but they drained his face, stuck a tube in there, put the cone of shame around his neck, pumped him up with painkillers and antibiotics, and sent him home. So now I have a cat with a tube sticking out of his face that is constantly draining disgusting cattily fluids everywhere and he has to keep the cone on, so he is also very angry. Frankencat.
Luckily he gets his tube out today and hopefully everything can go back to normal. We assume it was some sort of outside creature that got him and not our other cat, so now that they are indoor cats again he should be safe from this sort of thing. At least he’d better hope so. I can’t afford another vet trip like that; it’s way too expensive!
