In the ongoing saga that is Ding's foot, Dan is at the clinic with her right now. Hopefully all Dusty is doing is a bandage change. For those not keeping score at home, Ding is my 18 year old neurotic cat who chewed off her left dewclaw (toe) last summer. We've been trying to get it to heal ever since. The problem is she will not leave it alone. If we take the big satellite dish collar off of her, she goes nuts and starts tearing at it again. If we don't keep it bandaged, it gets kitty litter in it and gets infected. Dusty sewed it up again last night for the third time.

We're pretty much resigned to keeping both the bandage and the collar on her until it's fully healed. We tried a different, slightly smaller and less restrictive collar on her the other night, but she was able to stretch her hind foot forward enough that she could reach it, and she chewed on it to the point of drawing blood before I caught her. So it was back to the old collar.

The current bandage is splinted and goes above her elbow. We're hoping that the splint will immobilize the wound so she doesn't pull the stitches or reopen it just from flexing. It took her a half a day to get used to the new splinted bandage, but now she's actually walking on it better than on the old, smaller bandage. The old one she had taken to sort of walking on the outside edge, to keep weight off of the sore part, so she was sort of walking on her wrist. Now that she's gotten the hang of this one she's zinging around without so much as a limp.

I do want to make it clear that if I thought she was not enjoying a quality of life worth living, I would have her put down. I'm not stringing along some pathetic, suffering, miserable animal or anything. She's quite happy, moves around, is eating fine, is aggressively affectionate, and loves nothing more than to sit in someone's lap and purr. She's gotten so used to the collar that I don't even think she notices it much anymore. She used to kind of get stuck when the collar bumped into things but she's figured out how to swing her head around to negotiate tight spots with it on and everything.