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So about a week ago, May 30th, Tigger got out in the evening. We've been letting him out during the day but never at night. We looked around for a few minutes but there was no trace of him so we gave up, expecting him to come back as usual. Well, he didn't when he wasn't back by 5 the next day I made and put up a few signs around the neighborhood, he'd never been gone this long. When he still wasn't back on the third day i put up 50 more signs and looked all around the neighborhood for him.
We started to get a few calls from people who thought they'd seen him, but most of the sightings were erroneous. One family left us three messages. The first saying, "we think your cat is in the backyard, hes orange and you should come see if its him." the second saying, "we're holding onto this cat for you, we don't really like cats but we caught him and are keeping him in our house. he's orange and has a black collar." This is when we knew it wasn't Tigger because Tigger doesn't have a collar. so this family was holding someone's cat hostage (lol). Their last message said the collar said his name was not Tigger and they were sorry they bothered us. Nonetheless mom called them up and thanked them.
Anyways, we followed up a few more leads to no avail until early Monday morning, 7 days after Tigger had been missing we got a call from our next door neighbor saying they'd found him. Mom went and checked it out and found Tigger hiding at the bottom of the stairs going to their basement from the outside. She woke me up and we were overjoyed.
However, we quickly noticed he was limping and so we called the vet and took him in. The vet told us to bring him to the animal hospital in Woburn, so we did. After a series of tests we learned that he had broken a vertebrae in his back and had possible neurological damage. He'd also lost a pound and was very dehydrated. X-rays showed that his bladder was massively stretched, probably 4 times the size it was supposed to be. They recommended putting in a catheter and did, and his bladder shrunk back down. We also could see some other animal in his stomach, which means he did actually finally catch something. A neurologist looked at him and she told us that his back would heal, but should have surgery to stabilize it to keep from getting worse. She gave him an 80% chance of regaining full ability to walk and jump around. This was great news, but the problem is the bladder.
Basically, if Tigger is unable to pee we'll have to put him to sleep, otherwise, well do the surgery and he'll recover. So Tigger is currently sitting in the hospital, in the ICU, with an IV of pain medication and a catheter, and in a few days we'll take out the catheter and see if he can pee.
We visited him today and he looked better than yesterday, he was purring and happy to see us, when we took off his head-cone thing he ate, drank, and cleaned himself and was very happy to be pet and brushed. There's a lot of other animals there and for a while Tigger tried to stare down an 80 pound dog barking at Tigger from an adjacent cage. So I guess hes still got his spunk.
Anyways, everything's really on the edge right now. We'll see how it turns out. Tigger's 2nd birthday is in 10 days. I'd be very happy to be distracted by doing something fun so please call me and take me from my house.
Here's some pictures we took in the ICU today:
distressed
sick
happy
⇒
broken