Craziness with the Cat

So I guess it has been over a month now since we first started noticing Gracie's odd behavior.  She was vomiting frequently and having abnormal bowel excretions.  She just seemed so "off" and we really began to worry about her.  So, we took her to the vet where he figured she just had a hairball stuck in her intestines, so she had to have an I.V. and then we were sent home with some medicine.  Well, after a week she was still not doing any better and was completely refusing to eat anything.  So back to the vet we went.  He decided to do some x-rays to identify any blockage.  After finding said "blockage" they decided she needed surgery to remove whatever was trapped.  We were nervous wrecks by now and every time I went in I was preparing myself to be putting my cat "down".  The surgery went well except for they discovered a thin thread that she had swallowed that had gotten stuck in her stomach at one end and continued all the way to her rectum.  I guess in these cases the intestines get tangled into knots.  Luckily we caught it early enough that she didn't have any intestinal damage, but they had to cut into her stomach and 4 places in her intestines.  Ahhh!  Crazy.  Poor Kitty.  We took her home and ever since have been in the process of her recuperation.  I was so stressed the first couple of days because they tell you to limit their activity so we locked her in our spare room so she wouldn't go up and down the stairs,  but she would continue to jump up to the window sill.


By the end of that week I  was seriously at my wits end with worry and stress.  How could one little pet cause so much drama in my life.  :)  So after refusing to eat her food and really not getting better we were able to let her out of her room and she did better after that. 


A week ago we took her in to get her staples removed and since we were not very smart and didn't enforce her use of an E-collar, some of her incision was not healed and had become infected.  SO HERE WE GO AGAIN.  This past week has been filled with making her wear her collar, cleaning out her wound and making sure to put Neosporin on it.  Problem is, she hurt and hated this process.  Oh, and I also had to continue to force feed her her medicine.  Well the other day during this whole process of cleaning her she proceeded to scratch me up which had become normal, but she got her claw stuck in my nose.  I was so panicked.  I thought for sure she was going to slice through my nose as she continued to tug to get it lose.  I finally was able to pry her paw off my nose, and after everything else I just lost it.  I must be pregnant because I was just sobbing.  I think I had just been so scared and was coming down from an adrenaline rush because I just couldn't stop no matter how silly it seemed. 


Well, after ALL OF THAT it seems as if she is all healed up and back to normal.  Oh boy this has been a stressful, time consuming and EXPENSIVE problem.  I guess we must love these silly pets of ours.  :)