Posy In Distress

With three pets, there seems to always be something going on with one of them, health-wise, and this winter it is Posy’s turn in the spotlight.  For most of the past few months she has looked like this:

Or this:

Basically at the beginning of January I slowly noticed that Posy – who cleans herself constantly on a normal day – was paying way too much attention to cleaning the tip of her tail.  I felt it and could feel some bumps that I thought were scabs, and figured she must have a skin condition that she gets from time to time, which is scabby in nature and tends to go away relatively quickly.  But the slurping of the tail continued, and the next time I looked a few days later, it was all bloody, so off to the vet we went!

It was determined that perhaps in response to an injury, Posy had practically licked off the tip of her tail;  ick, I know – the wound wasn’t pretty.  We didn’t see our usual vet, and the guy we did see suggested I get a blow-up e-collar, that would allegedly be more comfortable than the usual e-collar.  I ordered one and when it came I realized it wouldn’t work for Posy, who is a tiny cat, but has a thick neck and very constricted airways.  So I tried a soft e-collar (the blue one in the picture above), but when I first put it on, she looked at me and commenced licking the tip of her tail with the e-collar on, all challenging-like.

I was taking Plum to the vet for a check-up, so brought Posy along for the ride, and our usual vet thought she could bandage the tail.  This was a Saturday morning and actually worked beautifully until Sunday night when Posy decided she had had enough of the bandage, thank you very much.  So I put the blue cone of shame back on, and this time Posy seemed to have forgotten that she could technically still reach her tail from it.

Since then, she’s worn the collar for five or so days, and then I’ve taken it off and she’s been fine for a few days, until the wound starts to itch again and she returns to licking and then I find pools of blood on the floor and the collar goes back on.  The wound is definitely healing – it’s about a third the size it was originally, but she has real problems leaving it alone.

The obvious solution is that I need to leave the collar on longer than five or so days, but she gets so dejected with it on!  And she follows me around and purrs and is all around very needy, poor thing.  The vet shaved the end of her tail, too, so it looks like a deflating balloon now. 

She is really such a sweet cat, on the whole.  She lets me put the collar on, and she is very, very tolerant with Owen, who gives her a little too much lovin’.  Owen will now imitate the voice I give Posy and will make her talk back to him, which makes me very proud, like my work here is done [brushes off hands].