Hi Lucky’s mom,

My cat Molly limped on her left front leg on 10/23/2020 after jumping off the scratching post. We took her to the vet the following day and they found dark lesion on her right front leg instead. She must have been using the left leg to compensate the pain on the right leg. They gave her a Buprenorphine injection and thought she may need an amputation because it looked like bone cancer. We saw an oncologist two weeks later on 11/6/2020 and he recommended amputation. He also prescribed Buprenorphine 0.3mg/ml (0.15ml twice daily under the tongue) and Gabapentin 50mg twice daily for bone pain for two weeks (pre-amputation). She had her amputation on 11/20/2020. She was on the same dose of Gabapentin and Buprenorphine 0.6mg/ml (0.25 ml every 12 hrs) for one week after surgery. She saw the vet again one week after and he didn’t think additional pain meds were needed. So far, I haven’t noticed phantom limb pain in her.

It was devastating learning that she had to get amputated. However, there were days I hoped we could get the amputation done sooner because I didn’t want her to be in pain and risk the bone would break before surgery. I hope you find the information above helpful. All the very best wishes for Lucky’s fastest recovery. 🙂

Huckleberry was on Gabapentin for between 2-3 weeks after surgery. It did help a lot with the phantom limb issue and he has not had any issues since then. Some furbabies are on it longer, some less. In a lot of cases (like ours) we really had to advocate for pain meds as our vet thought after a few days he would not need medication 

The buprenorphen also helped a great deal!

The medications did make him pretty groggy in the beginning, not so much toward the end of the recovery. I was grateful for groggy. They need all the rest they can get post surgery.

Jackie and Huckleberry