Genji-cat

(click on the title for a picture of sweet Genji)

About 1 a.m. Saturday morning, Scott heard an awful sound and ran outside to find a guy pulling two dogs off our tuxedo cat, Genji in our yard. Scott rushed him to the vet, and he had to have a rear leg amputated. There didn't seem to be any internal organ damage (thank Bast), but when they did an x-ray Saturday afternoon, they found that his bladder had migrated out of the abdominal cavity (there may have been a tear in the muscle, and when the leg was removed, the pressure keeping the bladder in may have been released, allowing the bladder to move.)

They had to do another operation to fix that (they said it was a relatively simple procedure) and also to do a small repair to the muscle of his remaining rear leg. His tail isn't moving they way they'd like it, but that could just be all the anesthesia, and hopefully not nerve damage.

Scott said the guy with the dogs said they would pay for the vet, (they live on our street, 1 block away) and Saturday morning the woman who owned them came by to apologize and again offered to pay for the vet. She said they are kept in her back yard, but escaped. Scott gave me a description of them, and one of them sounds like this dog who was running loose a few months ago who ran toward me growling and snarling fiercely when I stepped onto our carport -- I had to run back into the yard and close the gate and wait until he ran off -- now I feel dumb for not following up on it, but it was something that I'd forgotten by the end of the day. I need to go see if that is the same dog, because if it is, I think the neighborhood has a problem. Scott said that one of the dogs(the one that looks like the one I saw earlier) growled and snarled at HIM when he was trying to help Genji -- in our own yard.

We moved him to a critical care facility (just a couple of blocks from our home), where we were told that the prognosis for such an injury really isn't very good, but if he can make it through the next 48 - 72 hours, he'll most likely recover. When we saw him during visiting hours, he wasn't very responsive at first, but then he put his head up, and he tried to jump out of the kennel. His eyes looked much better than yesterday, as he didn't have that glazed over look, and it seemed that he knew who we were. He was pretty vocal, and it sounded more like, "Please get me out of here!" than "I'm in horrible pain," although I'm sure he is in awful pain. We'll get an update on his condition in the morning.

Even though the dog owners said they'd pay, we're not going to count on it until it happens. (They may not feel like it when we report the dog -- the Austin code has a provision that a dog that has killed or seriously maimed another pet cannot be kept in the city (unless the injured pet was in violation of the code, which I don't think Genji was.) We really anguished over this, since it's such a lot of money, but I really don't want that dog in the neighborhood where he might get out again to injure another pet or even a child.

When Genji was seriously ill with pancreatitis in 1999, we called him "rent payment" when we got the bill. When we got the bill for Saki's trip to the emergency vet earlier this summer (she's fine, now), we called her "mortgage payment. His new nicknames have been escalating now -- we're on "engagement ring," "small used car,"and we may end up with "house down payment" before we're through with this.