Sucky Summer, Continued...

I had to take my cat to the emergency animal hospital last night. Consequently, I didn't get much sleep.

Dan and I were watching a movie and we could hear Sam tearing around the house. That's not unusual. Then we hear a crash, and some quarters that were left in the hallway got knocked over. That's also not unusual. Sam gets into everything, and we generally just laugh and say, "Oh Sam..."

But near the end of the movie, I heard a strange/scary sound. I thought I heard a strangled kind of yelp or something. I went to look for the cat, and I couldn't find him. I spent a good couple minutes searching the house before I found him under my bed. Then I went to pet him, and he seemed OK. His tail was wagging and he was wide awake. But when I went to pull him out from under the bed, he yelped and I got worried. I set him down on the bed and he just kinda flopped over. I tried to stand him up again, but he couldn't stay up. His back legs didn't seem to work. That's when I freaked out.

Dan called his mom, and she drove us to the animal hospital. At first we thought he'd broken his leg. But when we got to the hospital, his tail had stopped moving. When the vet looked at him, she said that she thought there might be a spinal injury. She said she'd take some X-rays and that it would take 30 minutes to get the results.

I cried...a lot...

When she got back to us, she told us that nothing was broken, but that there were three possibilities of what could be wrong. I only remember two of them though. One was, he had a slipped disk, and the swelling had caused paralysis (or maybe a pinched nerve or somthing). The other was that he had a blood clot in the artery leading to his legs. She had to keep him over-night and give him a bunch of meds before she could narrow it down.

We just got a phone call this morning at 7:30. It was the vet to tell us that she thinks it might be a blood clot because his back legs are cooler than his front, and his pulse is weaker in his hind section than in his front. She's put him on blood clot medication, and we're gonna get a call later with better estimate of how much longer he's got to spend at the hospital, and also how much more it will cost.

She also said that it was a guarded prognosis that he'll regain full use of his legs, but when she called, she said that Sam was doing a lot better. That he was sitting up better (when last night, he couldn't sit up at all) and that his tail was wagging again.