[ June 6th, 2003 at 3:27 pm ]

The drive to Seattle went swimmingly well, considering that we had a carload of people with two cats, and we were towing a U-Haul that was pushing the Subaru’s engine to (or past) capacity. I’d like to publicly thank cat sedatives for keeping the girls calm, even when we stopped for ice cream at Wall Drug and they had to stay in the car.

What happened Wednesday night, however, will change Twinkie’s life forever. Here’s the story.

Apparently, sometime during the afternoon she escaped from the house and roamed around the neighborhood. I don’t know what exactly she got herself into while out there. All I know for sure is that when she came back she was in a terrible state. Her back legs had large bite marks all over them, and part of her tail, near the middle, had got all chewed up. Her tail looked like it was broken, and I could see bone in places. She was bleeding a lot and crying. That was totally a horrible sight. I wanted to take her to the vet right away, but unfortunately it was 7pm and they were closed. So I tried to wrap her tail in a strip of gauze, hoping to wait until morning, but that was too painful for her. I ended up taking her to a 24-hour animal emergency hospital just north of downtown. They took one look at Twinkie and told me she was very lucky to be alive, considering the extensive wounds. She received something like 15 sutures on her legs and rear end, and the vet was forced to amputate most of her tail. $700 later, she has about a 3″ tail now — even more stumpy than Molly’s. The poor cat is still in a fairly sorry state, on antibiotics and pain medication and limping around with a buster cap on her head to prevent her from ripping out her stitches. Since Wednesday I’ve taken her back to the vet twice for examinations to make sure that there were no infections on her wounds, and also to get her bandages changed.

So it looks like Twinkie’s going to be fine, but what a horrendous experience for her. Mark my words: she’ll not be going outside again, not even just to munch a few blades of grass. Our theory is that she strayed a bit too far into a neighbor’s yard and was ambushed by their vicious dog. We think Twinkie ran but was only just barely able to escape — thus the dog got a few nasty bites in. That’s our best guess, but we’ll never know for sure what happened. At this point, I’m simply happy that she’s still alive.