Isis's leg looks better. Isis's injury looks worse. I'm still advocating the wait-and-see approach.
I have a better handle on what I think happened now. It looks like he got a regular cat scratch on his leg. And it got infected. And he tried to fix it. And I just noticed it at its worst. Because now, it's a huge gaping open sore with pus in it and the leg is not swollen. So, I think he opened the injury and drained it himself. Good kitty.
He's so bitter about being an inside cat. I can't express his bitterness, because he expresses it through a lot of howling noises directed at the door. Unless I am supposed to be getting "I'm annoying and want to go outside" from them, in which case we are communicating as well as we should.
This morning I tried to do something to cover the injury. This began with toilet paper and medical tape and a cat. This was all easy to find as the cat is living his life attached to my legs until I should let him rejoin his friends outside and the rest was in the bathroom. Step one was folding the toilet paper. Easy enough. Then I pulled off a length of tape.
The cat saw the tape as an oppurtunity to both play and piss me off (see, cause normally, when he pisses someone off, they put him outside). That was five minutes of me trying to get the tape off of the cat and then away from the cat and then off of the cat and then away from the cat..... Finally I get the bandage all ready to go.
I grab the cat. I notice that he's purring. He loved the tape game I guess. Whatever. I pick the cat up and attempt to isolate his front leg. He takes this as more game and rolls over onto his back and flails while I try to pick him up and right him and get ahold of his leg. When I finally pick him up, I note that he is still purring. Okay, good, he's not mad.
I grab the front leg. I hold the (still purring) cat down. I wrap up the bandage. I watch about ten seconds of the cat picking at it followed by two minutes of him chasing the now removed bandage around the living room. This is why they make animals wear cones. Except Isis only used his back legs to remove it. So, I don't think it's bandageable.
I did try again, but that time I only got as far as approaching him (now seated by the front door. I took that to mean "I am so over this game and really wish you'd just let me out") with the implements in hand. Then I think he hissed at me. I'm not sure though cause I've never seen or heard him hiss before. Anyway, he looked pretty angry so I let it go.
Two hours later, it's less pus-y and more scab-y. I think that's really what we want here. So, I'm just going to continue watching him closely and keeping him prisoner in the house.
I do realize how lucky I am that I have a nice friendly, playful cat who doesn't mangle me when I subject him to such horrors as a bandage for his huge open wound. Seriously, I would not recommend doing that to a cat who is the least bit nervous or mean.
