No, he's not getting a haircut...

That's my little buddy Tybalt wearing what the vet calls an Elizabethan collar. He's got it on because we don't want him biting or scratching at the stitches he now has on his left thigh.

Stitches you say? What happened?

Well, apparently during the Thanksgiving weekend, he got into some kind of tussle with another animal... maybe a cat, maybe not. We had heard a fuss near the house, but neither of our cats appeared injured, so we didn't think much about it, as it wasn't the first time we've heard such things. Typically, when we've had other animals appear in our yard, Tybalt does a quick vanishing act, but this time he apparently had an actual encounter. Unfortunately, we didn't know until much later.

He was clearly feeling under the weather for a day or so, and we thought it might be something he ate, or some kind of stomach bug. But then we noticed he was walking funny, a slight limp in his back end. There were no visible signs of injury, so we thought maybe he'd pulled something, or perhaps suffered a hairline fracture or something, as he could still walk, but just wasn't zipping around the usual way.

Well, after a couple of days of improvement, he suddenly took a sharp turn for the worse, and off we went to the kitty emergency room. As the tech started examining him, an abscess in his hip ruptured, oozing a lot of scary looking goo. Yikes! So he spent the night there, getting the bad tissue removed and a bunch of stitches in his thigh. And of course that charming collar. He really hates it, and now that it's been about a week, he's really tired of having it on. Until I get him to the vet this week though, it's gotta stay in place. Every time we've tried taking it off for a few minutes to give him a break, he immediately starts fussing at the wound. The poor little guy. A lesson learned... the moment he acts odd in any way, he needs to get to the vet.

It could have been a lot worse, and I'm relieved he's on the mend.