Run Bart! Run!!!

Friday night we ended up in the ER with Bart. Okay, not the actual ER. But the pet instacare. We noticed a couple of days ago that there was a spot on his back that he kept licking and digging at. Then on Thursday night I noticed that the area was getting swollen and there was some blood dripping out onto his fur. We debated about exactly how to handle it. I was terrified that there was some worm or bug borrowing down under his skin.

Then last night when I got home from work he was acting really sick. His eyes were full of goop and his nose was dry. The right side of his back was completely swollen. I told Jared and we decided that we would take him to a vet on Saturday because we had already made plans for that night. So we went to dinner with Brennon and Lexi and came back to our place afterwards to watch a movie.

At this point there was a lot more blood and some pus leaking out of the wound. And he start ripping at the spot and it just erupted in globs of blood and pus. It doesn't sound nearly as disgusting as it looked. So we found a 24 hour vet and took him in.

After being violated by the vet tech and finding that he had a slight temperature (you can't put a thermometer into a cats mouth...) we were told that it was an abscess that had ruptured. Basically Bart had been attacked by another cat, the skin had healed too quickly locking all of the infection inside and it had irritated him enough that he ripped it open. It was obvious from the location of the abscess that Bart had made an attempt to run away but was not very successful. Maybe we need to start training him on a tread mill.

So the vet put him under, opened the wound more and cleaned out all of the infection then stapled him back up. And to top it off, Bart has to wear a cone around his neck for the next two weeks until we can go get the staples taken out. I'm sure you can imagine how much he's enjoying that.

So the moral of the story is that Bart had the right idea about running away but he just wasn't quick enough.