My lovely cat was hit by a car two weeks ago and afterwards he dragged himself home with a fractured front leg. The leg is bandaged right up to the underarm - as it needs to be - and is changed once a week at the vet's. In the meantime he's living in a humanely-sized dog crate. But the main problem (which some of you may have encountered yourselves) is that a heavily-bandaged front leg makes it very difficult for a cat to clamber on and off his litter tray, let alone attempt to bury his poop. My poor cat's injured leg flails around out of control, with the inevitable result that the bandage gets dragged through the poop, after which the poop gets transferred to his crate-mat, his bed and worst of all to himself.
I dread getting up in the mornings because of the poop-related chaos I'm almost certain to find in his crate. First thing this morning I spent an entire hour clearing up poop, throwing out bedding, brushing up wildly-scattered cat litter, washing down the floor of the crate etc. before I could even think about having breakfast.
My biggest dread is the aftermath of his weekly rebandaging session at the vet's, because they insist on sedating my cat before removing his old bandage and fitting a new one. This means he comes home completely out of his brain - hallucinating, throwing himself around in his crate and inevitably weeing and pooping wherever he feels like doing it, after which he walks through it or even lies down in it.
I'm absolutely at my wits' end after a fortnight of this, yet I'm told my cat may have to remain in his crate for two or three months altogether.
Basically I have two big concerns:
(1) After two weeks, my cat smells absolutely terrible and is obviously covered in poop-related bacteria. How on earth can I hope to keep him clean and sweet-smelling? I can't attempt to give him a proper bath, because his leg is all bandaged up and even if it weren't he would flail his legs around and re-fracture the bone while I was trying to bath him. I've tried using dry foam shampoo, but after each session he seems to smell just as bad, since it appears there's nothing antibacterial about dry shampoo. If he smells this bad after just two weeks, where is this all going to end?
(2) Is it actually safe for a cat to be sedated every week? Mine comes home in such a terrible state that I worry his brain won't be able to withstand the punishment indefinitely. He has this stoned, bug-eyed look to him and I know he sees non-existent creatures flying around him, because he swivels his head around as he watches them and he lunges at them and then jumps back from them. He has no idea what food is or what a bed is - and all of this is still on-going by the time I myself turn in for the night. I get up next morning to more excrement chaos and for the whole of the following day you can see that he's still largely out of it. The vet says he has to give my cat a set amount of sedative, dependent on his body weight - but whilst some cats are back to being themselves within a few hours, mine takes the best part of two days to recover. Is this safe? Or can repeated heavy sedation take a toll on a cat's brain and leave him permanently damaged?
Many thanks for any help or advice you can offer. Especially advice re. keeping the cat clean. I'm in poop hell here, see.
I dread getting up in the mornings because of the poop-related chaos I'm almost certain to find in his crate. First thing this morning I spent an entire hour clearing up poop, throwing out bedding, brushing up wildly-scattered cat litter, washing down the floor of the crate etc. before I could even think about having breakfast.
My biggest dread is the aftermath of his weekly rebandaging session at the vet's, because they insist on sedating my cat before removing his old bandage and fitting a new one. This means he comes home completely out of his brain - hallucinating, throwing himself around in his crate and inevitably weeing and pooping wherever he feels like doing it, after which he walks through it or even lies down in it.
I'm absolutely at my wits' end after a fortnight of this, yet I'm told my cat may have to remain in his crate for two or three months altogether.
Basically I have two big concerns:
(1) After two weeks, my cat smells absolutely terrible and is obviously covered in poop-related bacteria. How on earth can I hope to keep him clean and sweet-smelling? I can't attempt to give him a proper bath, because his leg is all bandaged up and even if it weren't he would flail his legs around and re-fracture the bone while I was trying to bath him. I've tried using dry foam shampoo, but after each session he seems to smell just as bad, since it appears there's nothing antibacterial about dry shampoo. If he smells this bad after just two weeks, where is this all going to end?
(2) Is it actually safe for a cat to be sedated every week? Mine comes home in such a terrible state that I worry his brain won't be able to withstand the punishment indefinitely. He has this stoned, bug-eyed look to him and I know he sees non-existent creatures flying around him, because he swivels his head around as he watches them and he lunges at them and then jumps back from them. He has no idea what food is or what a bed is - and all of this is still on-going by the time I myself turn in for the night. I get up next morning to more excrement chaos and for the whole of the following day you can see that he's still largely out of it. The vet says he has to give my cat a set amount of sedative, dependent on his body weight - but whilst some cats are back to being themselves within a few hours, mine takes the best part of two days to recover. Is this safe? Or can repeated heavy sedation take a toll on a cat's brain and leave him permanently damaged?
Many thanks for any help or advice you can offer. Especially advice re. keeping the cat clean. I'm in poop hell here, see.
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