Hello,

I am new to this website so I hope I'm doing this right. My almost 2 year old cat clay is a little more than three weeks out from his rear leg amputation. His recovery has been relatively smooth but now we are experiencing some challenges.  Clay has been on gabapentin since the surgery. Initially he was supposed to take it for one week and then stop, but we witnessed what we assumed were phantom leg episodes especially towards the end of his dose, so we decided to keep him on the same dose (100 mg twice a day) for another week.

This week we have thought to wean him off his meds going down to 100 mg once a day and his behavior seems to be changing. Firstly, he is extremely skittish and keeps getting spooked by almost nothing. For instance a little scrap of paper on the floor  can cause him to jump in the air, land badly on his back leg and then he sits with his tail curled around him. 

There have been several times that I've picked him up and he's shaking and tense and his claws are out where as last week or the week before he was his normal old self just with an E collar and stitches. 

It seems that there is a relationship between his skittishness, his shaking and his gabapentin dose, but I'm concerned that he's not healing correctly if he is still needing this medicine at what is now two weeks past when the doctor prescribed it. Is it typical for pain to worsen three weeks out from surgery or for the cats behavior to change at this point?