Cat tail pull injury

[imip]

Our poor little one year old cat has (we think) been attacked by another animal and has had a stretched spinal cord. The outcome doesn’t look good and we are waiting hopefully at the moment, but we are not quite sure how thing to wait (and stretch out dc anxiety, they think cat is going to be PTS).

It’s likely she won’t poo or wee, and we would manually have to do it. We think in this scenario we would PTS, but she is showing some signs of movement in her sphincter. ATM, she is at the vets and has been since Sunday. I wondered if anyone had been faced with this scenario with a ‘successful’ outcome. She will have to have her tail amputated, that’s fine. It’s the pooing and seeing twice a day we would struggle with and we want to her to be able to do this on her own. We were wondering how long to ‘wait and see’. Anyone have any advice?

Can't give you any advice as I haven't come across this before, but didn't want to read and run. If you can't get a response here, might be worth posting on a pet forum.

Thank-you, I didn’t realise there was a pet forum as well. Today cat felt pain from a rectal thermometer and then urinated - not sure if it was pressure in her bladder. We are a tiny bit more optimistic today.

Hi op - I’m so sorry this has happened . My beloved 7 year old puss had a tail pull injury from an RTA. He was in the vets for a week not weeing or pooing and was getting very distressed when being assisted to do so. I asked them to pts when he was very drowsy on painkillers and already had a cannula in so he didn’t have a clue what was going on. I did a lot of research at the time and the bowel function stats weren’t favourable so I put him out of his misery. It’s an awful decision but I saw it as my last act of love to the poor guy. I hope your cat fares better . He is younger and it may be a less severe injury . Ask the vets to be honest with you about probabilities x

Thanks rose. Sorry to hear you had such a bad outcome. We were resigned to euthanasia, and it’s actually the vets saying another day or two, it’s day 5 now and we are getting daily updates. We e read a reliable time frame is two weeks, so it may be she comes home. We have 2 dc with ASD who are struggling with it as well, so knowing outcomes help us plan our narrative with them. I did look on pet forum, which had some great info.i guess we can now only wait.

Fingers crossed for you 🤞

Fingers crossed here too.

Thanks all. Unfortunately she was put down last night. We are all very sad and it was a terrible decision to make. Thanks again x

That’s awful, I’m so sorry you had to do that.

How sad. Sorry she's gone

So sorry op, it’s an awful awful decision to make but I think you’ve done the right thing. A good owner doesn’t let their pet suffer and you acted with kindness. Cats do not enjoy indignity and you were right not to drag things out x

I'm sure you did the right thing. .

I know someone who carried on for a few months manually 'evacuating' her cat and I don't think it was beneficial to either. X

I’m so sorry OP, it’s such an awful thing to go through. As others have said, it sounds like you made the right decision for her xx

Thanks so much for all your kind comments ohshit that was exactly our problem, if we had to manually evacuate our cat, dc would not understand why she could not remain alive, particularly when 2 dc have autism and seem to not be taking it all in too well. We’d be dragging out what was possibly inevitable. X