Poor Kitty :-(

by Stephanie

So we have been taking a little bit of a break from wedding related projects because one of our cats, Harley, managed to dislocate her elbow the other day. It was pretty bad. I am going to get a copy of the xray one of these days so I will post it. It was horrible!

The surgeon was able to get her elbow back in the socket and now she is in a big cast. The cast has to be on for two weeks total (one more week to go!) and then she can't really do much jumping, climbing, playing, etc for an entire MONTH after she gets the cast off!

The worst thing about the whole incident was that when we brought her home after they put the cast on she had a REALLY horrible reaction to coming off the last of the anesthesia combined with the opioid (basically really strong kitty morphine) pain medicine they were giving her. She started freaking out and hallucinating and screaming and thrashing around. It was honestly the scariest thing I have ever seen. We had to call the ER vet again and ended up having to lock her in the bedroom with all the lights out and no noise or people and let it pass. Basically any stimulation just made the freak out worse. The next morning she was back to acting normal which was nice. Well, normal for a cat who has a cast on anyway!

Needless to say, she does NOT like having the cast on. After about two days she figured out how to walk (hobble, hop) around really well. She can walk well enough that she can make a break for the door every time we open it up lol. She now feels good enough that she will sit next to the door and bang her cast on it over and over and over. It sounds like someone is knocking on the front door. The vet said she can bang it all she wants, it isn't going to hurt her elbow...instead, it will just drive me totally insane! We have been giving her Lorazepam which is supposed to calm her down a little bit, but it doesn't do anything.

Here are some pictures of our poor kitty in her cast. We both signed her cast with a purple sharpie which I thought was really cute :-)

Still totally wiped out after coming home

She is SUCH a daddy's girl lol.

The cast had to immobilize both the shoulder and the elbow.
Zoe is still wondering what the heck is stuck on Harley's arm!

"Get this stupid thing off of me!" She kept kicking at it for two whole days.

This is when she still refused to stand up. She would just drag herself around the room. It was so sad and funny all at the same time. At least she felt good enough to drink some water though!

It took her a while to figure out how to turn around with the cast on. She would just sit and stare at her bed because she couldn't figure out how to turn around enough to lie down. We would have to pick her up and put her in her bed.

"But I want to go outside!!!!"


She can stand!




"What do you mean I'm not supposed to play with anything!?"

"What if I just play with Zoe instead?"

Her arm sticks up in the air when she lies down on her side :-(

The used such cute VetWrap! It is more like a sticky ace bandage, or medical tape, than an actual plaster cast. She has a big plastic splint underneath, wraped up in gauze and then wrapped really tight in VetWrap.

She is so pretty. I wrote "I love you! Love Mommy" on her cast.

"I'm not playing I swear! I have NO idea how this mouse toy got under my paw..."

She really wanted to play so we made a makeshift toy for her. We didn't want her flopping all over the place throwing her mouse around so we tied it to some ribbon so we could control where the mouse was. She loved it!

Happy kitty.

She can walk!

You can sort of see what Danny wrote on her cast on the right. "Get well soon! Love Daddy"

They are such good sisters. Zoe misses playing with her SOOOO much.

So she gets her cast off on May 4th. Hopefully when the take her cast off the elbow will stay in place. There is a chance that it could pop back out if the ligaments haven't healed themselves all the way. If it pops back out they have to do surgery and screw the elbow in and maybe use some pins...not what we want to have happen. Please keep your fingers crossed that it stays in place!

Once things calm down here I promise I will be back to all my wedding projects!
And they lived happily ever after...