Caring for a Three Legged Dog or Cat

They don't have any idea. They think that he may have just been grooming himself and he did the little 'nibble' thing they do and it just went from there.

We got him home around 10:00Am this morning and he is one pissed off cat hahaha. The vets office couldn't even keep the cone on him. He have a drawstring one here at home that seems to be working for now. but he has pulled it off 2x. My husband just keeps putting it on. we ordered a different one from Amazon that should be here by Friday. Hopefully he takes to it more.

He is being extremely vocal and yowling/hissing/growling trying to get it off as I type. I wonder if it's also due to the anesthesia wearing off and freaking him out. Who knows.

They were able to bury the stitches again so he doesn't have to go in and get them removed (thankfully). But I fear it is another 2+ weeks of round-the-clock watching him to make sure he doesn't bite himself. Apparently he cannot be trusted.

Good Morning!

After Scott calmed down and the anesthesia wore off, he has just been a sleepy, snuggly cat. He got his cone off about 5x last night but we kept it on him while he was awake. When he was eating or sleeping we took it off and he seemed to be more relaxed.

Jerry - I think you may be on to something about his old stitches bothering him because he is acting more calm this time around and the stitching looks a lot better now than it did previously. He is on Onsior until today and we are continuing the gabapenton every 6-8 hours. But he is still just a little more relaxed.

Hopefully in another two weeks this will all be behind us and we can go back to some sort of normalcy.

How do you know when internal stitches are fully healed though? because we really thought after 2wks 3 days he wouldnt be able to pry them open.

Good Afternoon!

So a newish development in Scott's recovery. Last night around 10pm he started acting more withdrawn. His eyes were very dilated and he would random jump and run to a new spot in his "recovery pen". Then he would hunch down and whine a little bit. No aggression though - like the last few weeks, so that is great??!

He took the last of the Onsior at 5pm and his Gaba at 9:45. He had this behavior roughly 5-6 times from 10pm until midnight. An hour or two after he got his gaba he would kind of nod off to sleep, but it still looked like he was uncomfortable, poor guy, and would randomly jerk awake and jump away. His sutures look great! No heat, oozing, bleeding, etc. They actually look better than when the original surgeons did it. I didn't think he would be so uncomfortable after re-suturing him since he is about 2.5 weeks into full-recovery.

My husband took over for me around 1:30 and he did not experience this with him. They cuddled all night long and Scott looks better and bright eyed this morning. He stretched out and was being cute.

An hour ago though he started acting a little weird and curling in on himself (based on a photo my husband sent me; he took his Gaba around 10:30).

I called the vet, explained what is going on. She gave us some transdermal tramadol a few months back and wants us to give him 0.1mL 2x daily for the next 10 days, and give the Gaba every 6-8 hours.

I am so nervous that this Tramadol is going to create behavior changes. I don't know why I think this - I think I'm just so scared that anything we give him is going to have him in a state of scared confusion. Maybe it is the lack of sleep talking again. They won't give me anything else for him though. So at this point, this is our only shot since his next dose of Gaba isn't until 4:30-6:30.

Tomorrow, we have a cat sitter coming for 2.5 hours so my husband and I can go to an event that we had booked for 2 months. I just really hope everything is going to go okay and Scott starts feeling better.

I feel like this is such an uphill battle and we are getting defeated at every corner. Scott is such a beautiful, kind, and sweet kitty and I hate that this is what he has been dealing with for so long. It is hard not to compare recovery stories and feel slightly jealous of seeing cats getting "back to normal" ish around this time and we are back at square one.

Thank you all for reading these posts and giving advice and a sense of companionship. Tripawds is such a wonderful community that I cannot thank enough.

seeing other peoples' cats jump back super fast made me feel like there was something I was doing wrong. The choice to amputate carried such incredible sadness and guilt for me that once it was made my brain happily converted that into taking every awful thing that happened afterwards as a consequence of this thing I did to my cat that I was personally responsible for.

This is exactly what it feels like! It's like I cannot predict what is to come and have no idea what to even expect.

It felt like it wasn't going to end, and I felt like I couldn't leave her alone for a minute, I couldn't sleep, was just hyped up on adrenaline and stress all the time. There were times when I felt like the only way I could keep her alive was through force of will. It was awful. I had to recover from the trauma like she did, and in a lot of ways she bounced back faster, but it did get better.

  

This is really well said. It is something that we must remember as tripawd parents! Thank you for these kind words!

Good Afternoon! So a few updates:

Scott is now allowed to roam the house but still has to keep his shirt and/or cone on per doctors orders until they tell us otherwise. He has gone down the hallway and into the living room but really has no interest like he used to in wandering the house.

We tried the weaning process and it was a disaster. The vet did not give us much to go on and just said "do whatever works". Hindsight, I should have looked more into it - but we decided to not give Scott his morning dose of gabapentin. By 1:30 (so about 17 hours past he last dose) he started getting aggressive, growling, hissing, and trying to lick/nip at his feet and suture site.

I fear he was having withdraws. We immediately gave him some gaba and he calmed down. We continued the 12 hours from then. Sunday he had another episode again.

So far, he is only really grumbly/growling when he gets up to move initially, but sometimes this doesn't happen, its a crap shoot and there isn't too much of a pattern. He is sleeping all day and night (because of the Gaba). I called our vet to explain what happened. She is going to give us 50mg tablets this week to try and start on Saturday (if she sees the suture and it looks good to her via photo).

I hate being negative but I feel like this is as good as its going to get. The vet has no answers for why he is aggressive off the meds. She said it could be pain/soreness/change of routine/anxiety/etc. But there is no way to tell. She doesn't want us to live him by himself for another 2 weeks and it is becoming really difficult with our work lives. I hope by this weekend we see more improvements and no steps back.