The top of it started bleeding just before Midnight Tuesday. I was reading in bed when I realized her cat-cone was covered in red-brown something. She's been trying to lick her hurting paw and succeeded only in smearing blood all over the underside of the cone.
I tried to clean her up with little success. I brought her into my bedroom and kicked the other cat out. I spent the next two hours awake in bed worrying. When she'd licked her stitches open that had been on the underside of her paw and this bleeding was coming from on top. She spent the whole night and the next morning just sitting in the same spot on the floor in a bed I made for her by balling up my fuzzy robe. By dawn the bleeding had stopped and the swelling had gone down. By 2pm when I finished teaching the paw was swollen again.
I called and got an appointment with the vet. The whole time the vet-tech was asking me questions I was certain that I was overreacting. That she'd just managed to dig the rough edge of her cone into her paw and that it would fix itself.
But when the head vet came in she immediately said 'punctured abscess' -- now I didn't know what that meant at the time but it didn't sound good.
Turns out that there were four holes in her paw, the incision from surgery and three more points where it had burst, and the flesh was purple.
Purple!
So they doped my kitty up on pain meds and stronger antibiotics, bandaged her paw and asked to keep her overnight.
The vet seemed hopeful that they could fix her up, but it wasn't until I called my father to update him that I got nervous. He started telling me how an abscess in an area without a lot of soft tissue can really get dangerous quickly because what is essentially a small, hard ball of infection pushes on everything around it, and where there's no soft tissue to push around (like in a foot) it starts getting mean.
Rosie, alone for the first time, is confused. Normally a quiet cat, she meowed all last evening.
While typing this I got the update call from my vet. Things look better with the paw, and Ash is being Ash: purring for the vet and eating chow. But they still want to keep her another 24 hours minimum.
