Post Op Day 1

Peanut was dropped off at the hospital yesterday for his blood work and then surgery. He was in surgery for approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes and had no complications from the anesthesia or pain meds. Yesterday filling out his intake forms was very difficult because they ask you as the pet parent how far do you want to take this if things go bad. It was a very tough choice because when is enough and what kind of risks are we looking at. Our family chose to go with save his butt at all cost because we had just lost another pet and our older cat was having a hard time dealing with that death and I couldn’t lose both of them so quickly. We had an amazing surgical team and I spoke with our surgeon at around 2 pm and we were able to see Peanut at 6 pm while he was still mostly sedated.

He was released at 2 pm with tons of aftercare instructions. He is not able to stand up and use his litter box so I was taught how to encourage him to pee. He has come home with an ice pack, anti-inflammatory pills and instructions to make sure he didn’t lay more than 2 hours on each side. I had expected him not being able to use the box because he doesn’t have a ton of muscle in his leg currently and when they got in there it was discovered his muscle atrophy was even worse than they had expected so he will have a longer recovery time to learn to use them again. I am supposed to hold him up and support his body weight so he will start learning to stand up again and support his own weight.

He has been trying to walk around the house all afternoon trying to find the right place to put his head down. He has a Fentanvl patch on to help with the pain and will be receiving an injection for pain tomorrow. So far we have had the blood curdling cries of pain which send a shiver up your spine and attempts to eat his sutures but nothing too extreme for a cat who will be learning to walk again.

His rehab will be using ice pack to keep the swelling down and rotating his leg like you are riding a bicycle for 5 minutes twice a day on each side as tolerated. With Peanut being so food motivated we will be using treats to get him to stretch the muscles down his side. He doesn’t seem to want to eat anything currently but that could be his pain meds wearing off.