We didn’t want to post about this until we had the pathology results back; and now that they are we can not only tell the story, but let out a big sigh of relief as we do so.

Last Thursday, we noticed that Simon appeared to have an ear infection. We cleaned it out as best as we could (it was really painful so we didn’t want to dig around in there too much) and used some Otomax we had left over from Calvin’s ear trouble a few months back. By the weekend, however, the ear was getting worse instead of better so off to the vet we went. Joy was working that weekend, so we had to drop him off on our way to go take care of the shelter animals on Sunday. We knew they were going to have to sedate him to get a good look, so it was just as well.

A few hours later, we went back for a slightly stoned cat and a troubling diagnosis;  it wasn’t really an ear infection, at least not in the usual sense. Simon had some sort of badly necrotized patch in his ear, not deep down in the ear canal but rather in the flap, and the vet wound up having to cut away a big circle of necrotic inner ear skin and cartilage. If the area had been any larger, in fact, the ear might no longer have stood since the only thing left once she was done was the outer skin. She sealed the raw area with a patch of wound glue and sent him home with a clown collar and a few days worth of pain meds.

What made us all nervous is that the area wasn’t so much infected looking as just… rotted. We discussed the possibility of a venomous spider bite… and the big C. Under the circumstances, she wanted to send the tissue off for a biopsy and we were happy to agree.

One good thing was that we had told her to go ahead and take an X-ray of his back end while he was out, since he’s pretty painful back there. We’d talked about doing this before, but it wasn’t something we wanted to put him under for; we’d always said if he had to get anesthesia for some other reason we’d have it checked, and here was our chance. His hips where he had the two femoral head ostectomies (in simpler terms, he’s had the ball part of the hip joint removed on both sides because he had a rare disorder that caused them to crumble away) looked great. It’s his spine that’s causing him trouble, he has arthritis. It was good to find out what’s causing his pain, and we’re going to start him on some glucosamine to see if it gives him some relief.

The biopsy results came back “necrosis secondary to infection” so we can stop worrying about some sort of nasty cancer, and he got started on some heavy duty antibiotics. Our best guess is that he was wresting with Calvin, and got kicked in the ear with a claw that had something foul on it.  He seems to be on the mend, and we’re very relieved.