August 3, 2013
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Not a Cat
Our Beloved Golden Hound is sporting a leg cast these days.
About a week ago he jumped to nail a taunting squirrel, came down on top of a trellis, got his foot caught, knocked the trellis over and screamed loud enough to call the people across the street over to find out who was killing our dog. We managed to free him (it took about five of us) from the killer trellis, and he trotted away (notice the absence of the verb ‘to limp’) a free dog.
We examined his wound. He had a scratch. We treated it with antibiotic cream and let him go.
We high-fived each other on our extraordinary luck at getting such a wonderful ending to what started as such a horrific story.
Riley grew a scab on his scratch. We covered it with triple antibiotic ointment and sighed with relief.
A week later Riley had a naked patch of leg about three inches long and an inch wide, in the center of which was a weal of what my mother would call ‘proud flesh’.
I should insert the recurring paragraph that begins, “I was raised by a cat…” right about here. When a cat sports a visible wound which it licks repeatedly, favors when it remembers to do so and growls with its co-cat comes near it, there is about a 50-50 chance your cat is already half-dead. In fact, if you even suspect there is something wrong with your cat, grab your credit card and you and the cat should RUN to the nearest vet.
I thought, “Absess. Blood poisoning. His leg is broken and he has been gamely walking on the splinters all of this time.” I described his injury to a dog person.
She said, “He’s obsessing’.” She referred to something she called ‘the cone of shame’.
I went home and looked at Riley’s leg. It looked like…well, it looked like a dog-leg that had been licked obsessively, but I thought, “There’s a reason why he’s doing that…”
I told Nancy I would take him to the vet the next day.
She called her daughter, who is Murphy’s person. Murphy was the shared dog who convinced me my life was incomplete without a full-time dog.
Ranee said, “he’s obsessing. Is it hot?”
It’s the same temperature as his other leg.
“Does he limp?”
“Not unless he remembers to.”
“It’s not broken, Cheryl,” Ranee said over the phone, because in order to stop sharing her dog, she moved to Florida where I can’t get to her. “Wrap it up so he can’t get to it and keep it wrapped for a few days.”
Soooo… *smirk, smirk* It turns out there IS a use for Cheryl’s ability to bandage a pin prick in such a way that the person needs crutches to haul around the bandaging. It’s to keep the dog from repeatedly pulling the bandaging off. We have it down to a science, now: hydrogen peroxide wash, triple antibiotic cream, waterproof gauze, the plastic tape the doctor sent home to keep my eye patch on when I had my cataract removed. I threatened to tape his leg to his body and make him hop on three legs for a week, just as a prelude to what would happen if he kept screwing with it, but Nancy felt I was being too harsh.
When he’s not sitting between my knees muttering, “I’m sorry, Cheryl, I’m really sorry,” he avoids me.
“You are NOT a cat,” I have lectured him more than once.
He seems not quite sure what to do with that information.
Comments (1)
My guess is he would be equally confused by the comment, “you are not a human.”