One of our cats got hit by a car. He’s been known to roam a bit, so we weren’t terribly worried when he didn’t show up for breakfast the first day, but by the second day we were checking with the animal shelters. He’d slipped his collar a few weeks before, but luckily he has one of those chips.
I originally thought the chip would act like a GPS or something; that there’d be a way to locate him the way you could a cell phone. Not so. The chip is scanned by the shelters when a cat is turned in. The shelter then checks the number the chip puts out against a database to find the owner. That’s how the veterinarian found us.
Animal Control had found him in the road and taken him to the veterinarian of their choice. The veterinarian then kept him in a cage, essentially untouched over the weekend. They waited until we came and claimed him, and agreed to pay the thousand dollars it would take to put him together again.
He had both of the bones in his foreleg broken and a smashed in hip. They put pins in the foreleg bones, a plate in for the hip, and completely removed his tail. Now we have to keep him in a cage for six weeks so he doesn’t re-break the vulnerable bones before they get a chance to heel.
The hardest part has been watching how much pain he is in. He has nerve damage in his hind leg, so drags it around when he has to use the cat box. He growls when he has a bowel movement. He bites when we have to move him around. We can’t even comfort him with petting very well because of the inability to move him and the restrictions of the cage.
Worse yet is the fear that he will never fully recover. I’m not at all sure we did him a service in keeping him alive. All I can do is rejoice with each little bit of progress he makes.
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