Tied to machines that make me be
Posted by Ceri Davies Sat, 22 Jul 2006 00:26:00 GMT
Wednesday night, just before midnight, the phone rang. After nearly nine months being AWOL, a vet in Bridgend had found Murphy, still wearing his collar with our contact details. Bridgend is quite far from here, even if you’ve had 9 months to find it.
As the name suggests though, there was bad news. He had been found because he had been in a road traffic accident, and a pretty nasty one too. He had fractures to his upper jaw, his lower jaw, his palette. His good eye was inflamed and there is a possibility that he has lost or will lose sight in that one too.
The specialist had said that there was no hope of resetting the fractures in the head and that it would be necessary to just wait and see how (and if) they heal before knowing the next step. I’m not sure how good large amounts of opiates are at dulling pain, but they seemed to think that he wasn’t suffering at present.
After getting over the shock, I managed to get to the vet to see him today. They had discovered more problems. Just seeing him again after so long was emotional enough, and although he looked slightly better than I had expected, the damage to his eyes was worse than I had hoped with, cruelly, the worst of it on his good eye. Of course he’s having to be fed via a tube, so his neck was bandaged where it had been inserted. He has made no effort to stand, although his legs seem to be sound. Also, his tail has been damaged which, as we learned with Stella some years ago, can often cause the loss of bladder control in cats. Again, the vet is at a loss to predict how this will pan out right now.
We had a chat and I brought him up to date on what has been happening since October. He wasn’t too talkative and didn’t want to be drawn on what he’d been up to, but under the circumstances this is understandable enough. I believe he recognised me, or at least my voice, too.
I agreed with the vet that we’d wait the weekend to see if he could get some healing done in that time, and when Stef gets back into the country on Monday we’ll go back and see him, perhaps for the last time again.
Recovering from his loss was difficult the first time round, but to have him come back to us in these circumstances is simply cruelty. It has taught me this, however: if you are going to start crying and bewailing, do it before you hit the motorway. Also, never cancel insurance on a missing pet — having to consider finance as a factor at these moments is bitter indeed.
