An early Christmas miracle.................................

NOTE: If you get a little squeamish in the middle of the story hang in there I promise a happy ending...

Last Saturday morning I woke up to find Fred (the cat that adopted up last March) not bearing any weight on his right front paw. Having not gotten around to having him de-clawed yet I called the only vet I found that does Lazar de-clawing to see if they could see him since he needed to have a check up before they would do the procedure anyway.

Of course they could not fit him in on Saturday but said if he didn't seem to be too distressed they didn't see any reason that he could not wait until Monday to be seen. Except for the altered gait Fred was acting perfectly normal so we went with that plan.

Come Monday the vet checked him out and Fred let him know how unhappy he was when it came to having the paw touched. The Vet stepped back and declared that the only way they could treat him would be to keep him overnight, knock him out, X-ray the leg and go from there. For these diagnostic procedures the bill would be a minimum of $400.00. If anything needed to be done it would go up from there.

The faithful readers of this blog know how much I love Fred, but he is a cat and the way I was brought up animals are farther down on the food chain than humans (not to mention it is against the law to not seek medical treatment for your children) and I could just not see spending this kind of money to find out what was wrong with him. I called (my) Mister and he concurred so I packed Fred back into the kitty crate and brought him home.

In the small amount of time the Vet was actually able to check out the leg Fred only made noise when he arrived at the paw so I deduced that the leg was not broken, and that he had done something to the paw. We held his paw over the sink and dumped some peroxide over the paw and then put some antibiotic ointment on the paw.

We repeated this procedure again yesterday morning, and last night when Fred was jumping up onto his favorite ledge he hit the paw and some blood spurted out of it.

This morning he is weight bearing on the paw and seems to be just fine which totally supports my theory that the body is a miraculous thing and given time it will often heal itself without a lot of intervention. I am thrilled and grateful beyond belief. This makes two times now that I have almost had to lose Fred and then got him back.

And even though I know it isn't logical, somehow I feel $400.00 richer! Crazy I know...