I hadn't posted about this yet because I wasn't sure what the outcome would be until now.
Last summer we found a kitten trapped inside the engine compartment of a Mazda Miata that was parked near the neighborhood swimming pool. We managed to help her wiggle out, and took her home to clean her up and keep her safe until we figured out who she belonged to. She was very healthy, no fleas, well-fed, so we thought she was obviously someone's inside kitten that had escaped and gone wandering. We posted signs all over the neighborhood, but nobody ever called to claim her--so we dosed her with some of the FrontLine we had here at the house and decided to keep her. We named her Lily.
Lily is one of the most affectionate cats we've ever had, and has claimed our bedroom as her exclusive domain, much to the annoyance of the two neutered males that also live here. She gets along well enough with one of them (the one we call "Dori") but doesn't like our largest male (Poe) at all. Poe tolerates her and avoids/ignores her for the most part, but Lily is notorious for picking spats with Poe if he tries to come into the bedroom--HER room. We're hoping she'll eventually grow out of it.
Anyway, sometime during the middle of December, we're guessing that Lily must have gotten into a bit of a tiff with Poe, because she had a small bite wound (just pinprick scabs by the time we found it) on her right rear flank area. I didn't think anything of it at the time, because it was so minor--I put some topical antibiotic ointment on it and she seemed perfectly fine. When I found the wound, it was already scabbed, she didn't complain if I touched it (so it wasn't painful), and it looked like it would be healed within a day or two.
It did heal...but then an abscess started forming underneath of it. I kept an eye on it, but it was very small, and since we're pretty much broke until our student aid comes next week, a Vet visit was out of the question. (I did call and ask the Vet's office person if we could bring her in and pay for it in January, but she said "No, payment is required at the time of service." They do have a payment plan, but it's only for people who have really good credit, and we don't.) The lump stayed small for about a week, but on Christmas Eve I noticed that it was getting a lot bigger, and Lily was starting to shiver, run a fever, and lose her appetite. One of her eyes was getting a little "cloudy" too--I still don't know why, but I guessed at the time that there was a chance the infection was starting to spread through her body. She wouldn't eat or drink, her face looked a little swollen, she was stumbling and weaving when she tried to walk, she was yowling in pain and misery, and constantly shivering. It was terrifying how a simple small lump turned into *that* in less than 24 hours. I was absolutely convinced that she was going to die if I didn't do something fast.
I called the Vet again--again, they refused to let us bring her in now and pay later. I called three other Vets and got the same answer. (I'm not bashing Vets--I know they need to be paid. I'm just making sure everyone here understands that we did at least *try*.) All of them said that she was unlikely to survive without Vet care, and one of them told us as kindly as she could that the local shelter would likely euthanize her for free if it got to the point where she was suffering too much. But I couldn't stand the thought of giving up that easily.
However, I was desperate at this point. I went online Christmas Eve and looked up "feline abscess" to see if I could find some directions on how to deal with it at home until we got our money and could afford to pay the Vet. Apparently the usual procedure for dealing with a nasty abscess is for a Vet to lance it, drain it, wash it out, remove any infected tissue, and then put the cat on oral antibiotics until the wound closes on its own. I didn't dare try to lance it, because I didn't want to hurt more than I helped. But we *did* have an unfinished prescription for amoxicillin (in the form of hollow capsules with powder inside) that ThinkBlue1966 had gotten for a tooth abscess 7 months ago and didn't finish. Yes it was human medicine, but if I didn't do *something*, we were going to lose her, and I found plenty of websites that said amoxicillin is a common and safe antibiotic for cats.
I wrote down the "normal" dosage that a Vet would give after draining an abscess...then increased it, because she was fading fast, I couldn't drain it, and I had read that amoxicillin is pretty safe even at high doses. I figured she needed all the help she could get. We cut open the 500 mg capsules and used a knife to separate the powder into 5 equal portions (roughly 100mgs each). I mixed the powder into a tiny bit of canned cat food, scooped it up with my finger, and put the bit of food directly in her mouth (at this point, she wouldn't eat it on her own--she wouldn't eat ANYTHING). The website said to give 60 mgs once a day--I gave her 100 mgs roughly every 12 hours for the first 3 days. She didn't seem to be improving dramatically, but she did start eating the medicated food by herself, and she stopped getting worse. Her right eye was still cloudy, but it didn't look as swollen anymore, which was definitely a good sign.
About 4 days after we started the oral amoxicillin, the abscess (which at this point was nearly as big as a small tangerine) burst. There's no other word for it. She was laying down on her blanket in the bedroom, and all of the sudden she yowled a little, started trying to lick her side, and then there was just a huge mess of blood-tinged "stuff" all over the blanket and a gaping hole the size of a silver dollar in her side, and much, much larger than a silver dollar beneath the surface. At first I was relieved, because it was finally draining. But the hole it left behind was frightening. It looked like she'd been shot, it was so huge. It's a good thing I have a strong stomach. I Googled again, and found that I needed to rinse the hole out with an antiseptic solution and keep giving her oral antibiotics to help her fight off further infection until the hole closed on its own, so that's exactly what I did. I boiled some water and tossed in our turkey baster to sterilize it, then let it all cool. I mixed some of the boiled water with a little bit of rubbing alcohol (it's the only "antiseptic" we had), and used the sterilized turkey baster to squirt the solution into the hole until the water ran out clear. We did this every day until yesterday, as the hole kept getting shallower and shallower, and kept giving her the oral antibiotics too. Yesterday, I noticed that the hole looked like it was starting to close, so we stopped trying to rinse it out. Today it's down to the size of half a penny, and Lily is 100% back to her normal self. I'm going to keep giving her the antibiotics (although I lowered the dosage to 60 mg once a day about three days ago) until the hole has been 100% closed for at least 2-3 days.
I know that a lot of people in this world would probably consider me a terrible, neglectful, irresponsible person because I couldn't take her to the Vet when she really needed it. I know that those people would say that it was stupid to try and treat her at home, and I could have easily made it worse. But I did the absolute best that I could under the circumstances, and I'm pretty sure that it saved her life. ThinkBlue1966 and I both went without more than 3 hours of sleep at a time so we could be there to give her water when she didn't want to drink, carry her to the litter pan, coax her into eating when she didn't want to, boil water for cleaning several times a day, constantly pet and talk to her to keep her distracted so she wouldn't try to "lick" it so much, and keep her as warm and comfortable as possible. We lost one cat this past Fall when he slipped past us and got out the door, and got hit by a car before we could find him to bring him back in. I don't think I could have handled losing another. I was ashamed of the fact that we couldn't afford to take her to a real Vet when it all started, so I didn't talk about it here until now. But I wanted to share what we'd been going through, because I am so damned relieved and happy. It worked. We saved her. I couldn't save Byron, but I saved Lily. She is 100% healthy again. Her eyes are both clear and bright and back to normal, the hole is pretty much gone, and she's bouncing around the bedroom chasing her jingle ball as I'm typing this.
She's going to the Vet next week as soon as our student aid checks get here, so the Vet can take a look at it and tell us if there's anything else that needs to be done. When I tell him this story, he's probably going to tell me that it was more pure dumb luck than anything else, and I can handle that, because when he says it...Lily will
still be there, alive and healthy.
Lily, taken last summer right on the day that we found her
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