Our kitten has gotten sick. We got Jude in August from the Animal Rescue but he was fine then. He’s an adorable orange and white tabby who is quite vocal and playful. He’s loving, too, which is why I’m as attached to him as I am—he sleeps with me and follows me all over the house like a little puppy. The kids are all attached to him, too. Sweet Tart didn’t take too kindly to having her queendom brought down (she’s our three year old black cat, gorgeous, but not so friendly), but other than her we are all in love with Jude.
Two weekends ago I noticed Jude was walking funny, with his hind end lifted up and his back legs seemingly sore. Debby and I took him to the Carolina Veterinary Specialists who operate 24/7 on the weekends, and didn’t learn much of anything. They did give us some medication to give him for pain and had instructions to take him to our regular vet if anything else came up.
Tuesday I noticed a hole beginning to develop at the base of Jude’s tail; it was some kind of abcess that just looked horrible. It was at least the diameter of a quarter coin. I rushed him to the vet who gave me antibiotics, and said that the stuff coming out of it was just dead tissue (which was why it smelled so bad). Well, when that stuff started coming out again on Friday, I called up the vet and insisted on having them take another look. Yes, it did appear to be fecal matter coming from the hole. They sedated Jude to take a better look and ended up stitching his colon that had a tear in it.
The vet has kept Jude since then (it has been 5 days now) and wants to keep him until Saturday this week. They said he probably ate something he shouldn’t have that punctured through his colon, but they aren’t really sure what happened to cause this terrible condition. At first they fed him non-bulk foods to give the colon and stitches time to heal up a bit. Yesterday after feeding him regular food, the news looked bleak on his ability to survive, but today they watched him go potty and everything came out where it was supposed to. 
They are also only going to charge me boarding fees instead of regular hospital stay fees because he’s been such a good boy and they haven’t had to do much outside of flushing out the abcess everyday. And the surgeon isn’t charging me for stitching Jude up because 1. he didn’t ask me first and 2. he’d never done the procedure before.
So, I’ve been posting statuses on Jude’s progress on Facebook everyday this past week and thought I’d write up a whole blog to catch anyone interested up on the story. It’s surely not as interesting to most as it is to me, but he’s my cat. Just sayin.
