Hope’s Housewarming.

Look at this face:

That face belongs to Hope, my adorable and sweet little 7.5 year old Snowshoe cat.   Besides wanting to squeeze the juice out of her, I want to protect her always.  Wouldn’t you?  (If you are a cat lover that is).  And I’ve done a pretty good of that so far!

Last Friday, my husband and I moved into our new house.  We were very excited about this.  We really upgraded in our space, size, location.  We can’t get over how beautiful this house is and how fortunate we are to now own it.  Sure, its more to clean and more to heat in the winter, and yes, we have a driveway to shovel in the winter as well.  We thought the cats would LOVE it here … so much more space for them to run around in and stay away from each other when they want.  The wooded backyard … that is a cat’s dream!

However, there is the big foyer with the beautiful stairs:

Gorgeous aren’t they?  Yes, one of our favorite features.

Until …

You look down.  If you are scared of heights, its creepy.  If not, its cool.  Unless you are a small pet owner.

If you hadn’t noticed, the steps don’t have backs.  And cats often like to lay on carpeted things.  And squirm.

And sometimes, they squirm … right off the steps to the bottom of the spiral.

This happened to Hope.  She was squirming.  I saw this and tried to get to her, but I was too late.  The next thing I knew she was at the bottom, and landed on her side on the ceramic tile.   She wasn’t moving.  When I stood her up (I don’t recommend you do that, I am a trained professional) she fell right back over, so off to the emergency vet we went.

We knew she was alive, but she was very dazed and not moving, so all kinds of worst case scenarios went through our heads.  Spinal damage, neurological damage, a rib puncturing a lung.  We called the emergency vet while driving there and they were ready and took her back immediately.  After waiting an interminable amount of time, we found out that she is relatively okay.  She has a dislocated hip.  The x-ray showed that plain as day, but when when the orthopedic doctor looked at her, it was already in place.  We opted for an ultrasound to make sure that there was no internal bleeding and left her for 24 hours for observation.

We took her home the very next day, obtained a referral for a possible surgery, in which they would shave down the femur so that the hip could stay in place, and with orders to keep her on cage rest for 14 days.  If her hip stays in place, she will not need surgery.  But how can one know if she is caged all the time?

Anyway, she will not tolerate the cage.  All she does is cry, cry, cry and it breaks our hearts. Look at how sad she looks:

I finally let her out … she is walking fine, she runs around for a few minutes, then finds a place to sleep.  She is hardly an active cat anyway.

We’ll keep our eyes on her and get the steps corrected for safety.

I would just feel better if she would sleep somewhere other than the spiral steps.