Thanks for the reassurances!

Ziggy is currently on one daily tablet of Onisor, 0.25 ml of buprenorphine every 12 hours, and 1 ml of gabapentin every 8-12 hours. So it's a lot of painkillers, and I think maybe I was expecting more sleepy and less blank staring.

The good news is that he's been much more engaged the last few hours. He ate a bit this morning, we had a can of Hill Science Diet ID formula and he ate a bit of that, and we got him to eat a little spray cheese. I know that has a ton of salt so not a lot of that, but it's what our vet uses to distract them for temperature taking.

He's been standing a bit, managed to get to the litter tray for a pee, responding more to his brother meowing in the other room, so a bit better all around. I'm a bit concerned about some small amount of weeping from his incision, but I'll call the vet in the morning about that. And I discovered that what I thought were attempts to get out of the crate were actually efforts to get me to hold him, so he's had a few good long and very careful snuggles against my chest.

Might be a seroma , I'm not sure. Understandably he's not at all keen on me touching anywhere near the incision but I don't see any balloon-like puffiness, and the fluid coming out is kind of watery blood in color which is why I'm concerned, as that was listed on my cheat sheet as something to call them about. 

The Onisor is for 3 days (so two more after today), I'm guessing we have maybe 6 days' worth of the buprenorphine (the vet pre-loaded syringes of that for us) and who knows how much gabapentin, since that's all in one big bottle.

So the issues that will prompt a vet call are the weeping and the fact that I can't really get him to eat much, though I think maybe my wife has a magic touch that I don't with that. She's getting some very much needed sleep right now, but she should probably be awake soon and I'm sure she'll try to coax some more food while I catch a nap. I'm just spending some time with our other cat, since he's having some anxiety tantrums about us being out of the room. We didn't want him batting at Ziggy through the crate but he's, uh, very vocally disapproving of not being right in the middle of everything!

Aw, thank you so much for checking in!

We ended up having to take him back to the vet this morning. There was a spot in the middle of his incision that was sluggishly leaking blood - about a drop an hour which she wasn't too concerned about, but she thought it might be better to look to be sure. He would only eat a little and only if we forced him - good water drinking and peeing, though! - but she said they have food that I think she said was kitten distress food? All I remember was that it was canned and high calorie, so even if they had to mix it with some water and syringe feed him it would help.

The vet is literally right at the end of our street so it only took a minute to get there, but I think the movement (both car and him) didn't help. You were right in that he did have a seroma , but it seemed to have ruptured a little while we were in the car (he was sitting in a little puddle of junk when I went to check on him), and she said there was a lot of pus mixed in, from both the spot we were concerned about and the top of his incision closest to his head. She numbed it and then flushed it out several times until the fluid ran clear and it for flushed again this evening, and he ate a little more but they syringed him some as well. They're keeping him overnight, and even though tomorrow is her day off, she lives just as close as we do so she's going to stop by in the morning to flush it again, and if it's running clear we can bring him back home again. Of course he tried to kick the stitches so they put him in a hard cone and sent a pic, and man does he look mad!

Of course as soon as he got there, he ate 3 meatball-sized chunks of the food they wanted to give him without any effort. Ornery cats, LOL. She said it's a pretty common thing to happen to cats like him - another vet there adopted a stray who had to have an amputation and the same thing happened to that cat - about 1 in 4 will have a little issue like this, possibly because it's so hard for them to manage the litterbox at first without getting it on themselves. The first time he used the tray he ended up mostly just laying in it, so that might have been the problem, and when I tried to help him stand he acted like he wanted to get out without peeing so I left him alone. 

So a little bit of a hiccup, but still hanging in there!

I am SO EXCITED to report that Ziggy is back home now, and it's like we got a completely different cat! 

They did three rounds of flushing and sent us home with some Veraflox to add to the rounds of medicine. We're down to 2 times a day for the gabapentin, last day of Oncior tomorrow and a few days left of buprenorphin.

He's eating the high-calorie food without any forcing, he even ate one of his normal kibbles as soon as it was offered. He's standing up a lot more steadily now and he seemed to have a slightly easier time with the litter box this time... he was just really fussy about it before, so the combination of different box and weird litter is making him mad. Of course the cone and the crate are also making him mad, so there's a running theme here. 

The best parts are that his incision looks SO much better now... but mostly that he's actually engaged with us and what's going on, listening and responding to his brother's yowling, etc. I sat down with him to pet him and when he looked at me, I could see my boy in there again. I'm sure you know what I mean!

I'm not awesome at figuring out how to get pictures on here and I'm mobile which makes it a little more difficult, but if anyone wants to check in/follow, our Instagram is @herbie_and_ziggy and I post about them pretty regularly. Right now Ziggy is having a very supervised grooming session.

I couldn't figure out how to post a picture that wasn't absolutely enormous-looking on my phone, so here's the 2-picture album instead. Sorry for a little incision ick, but I figured most people here would be used to it!

Ziggy's dual cones of shame