Dilated

Warning: the photo is off-topic but it's all I have! 

No procession photos from me today. I intended to go to the last one this morning (Sunday, I'm backblipping) but life had other plans.

I let Mystère out as usual at 7:30 and was surprised when I got up an hour and a half later that he wasn’t waiting for his breakfast. There was no sign of him in any of his favourite places in the garden, and he didn’t appear by the time I was due to go out. In the end I decided to go anyway, hoping he would be home when I got back. I drove 50 metres down the road … and saw a terrified Mystère running up the hill, stumbling and weaving in panic as he went. So I quickly parked and hurried after him. He eventually realised it was me and stopped to wait. I picked him up … he was wet. Odd, there’s no water round here. Then I looked at my hands and realised it was blood. 

Emergency mode … at home I cleaned him up in several changes of water and identified the deep bite on his neck along with many scratches. It was near his jugular, but as it was dribbling rather than spouting blood I reasoned that it must have missed it, and I managed to more or less stop the bleeding by applying pressure for a few minutes.

Mystère almost always chooses to have medical emergencies on Sundays and bank holidays, so the next step was phone calls to track down the emergency vet, and a trip to a clinic in town. The very nice vet shaved fur, examined him, did a quick staple of the wound, and then observed that one of his pupils was completely dilated and the other not, which could be a sign of brain damage. Eek! If it hadn’t been a Sunday with nobody in the clinic, she’d have kept him in, but instead she told me to take him home, shut him in a quiet room, and keep an eye on him. 

So I spent a chunk of the day lying on the bed with him. I was encouraged that he enthusiastically ate a small amount of the special mushy cat food the vet had given me, but he really wasn’t in a good way. When he eventually attempted to walk, he was stumbling about like a drunk, so I thought he must have had a stroke as well as a fight.

In the late afternoon I went to Salobreña to pick S up from his Sierra Nevada adventures. He was knackered, so he was also happy to lie around with Mystère, who probably appreciated having two of us to keep him safe from the outside world.

As I’m writing from the future (couldn’t bring myself to blip while I was so worried about him) I can report that he slept soundly on the bed all night, unlike me, and in the morning his pupils looked a little bit better. Apart from walking, still a staggering meander, all his bodily functions were in working order. Gratuitous bread photo to spare you a gruesome blip of the wounds.

I’m so glad I found him when I went out. Another of his nine lives gone. I think it’s well past time he retired from fighting.