Strange week on the horizon.  Our cat Artie hurt his hip and has to undergo a femoral head ostectomy.

Last Saturday he wasn’t himself.  Instead of hanging around the porch in the morning, he was just lying in the basement. Sometime in the afternoon we checked on him because he hadn’t been upstairs all day.  He tried to go back up the stairs to get away from us but he was gimpy.  I’m not sure what might have happened.  Could have been anything.  He’s notoriously clumsy.  When he jumps off furniture he lands with a thud that sounds like someone just dropped a bowling ball.  And generally he’s kind of accident-prone anyway.  He always seems to be on the wrong side of a door that’s opening up, or getting accidentally stepped on, or falling off his cat tower in playful exuberance.  We joke a lot that he’s the most Extreme! cat we know, and have even invented a unit of measurement to describe his baseline extremeness, 1 Artie, which would be equivalent to, say, a BMX stunt rider doing a backflip off a cliff while chugging a Mountain Dew.  But he was down to about 0.3 Arties and we were a bit worried.

We were hoping it would clear up within a few days because he’d just been to a vet a few weeks back and obviously superfluous trips are worth avoiding for his sake and ours.  But it didn’t, so I brought him in for a checkup Tuesday afternoon.  Even though he’d been getting around the house a lot more, he was still in some pain and they needed to take x-rays.  Those revealed either a break or some general deterioration at the head of his femur (the ball joint that connects to his hip).  Not the kind of thing that would heal up on its own.

So, an FHO.  He’s going in Wednesday.  They remove the head of the femur and apparently the muscles and scar tissue are enough to keep the joint working normally in small animals.  It won’t be a fun time and it’ll be a while before he’s back to full strength.  Nor is it cheap, but we’ll let him pay off his debt at a reasonable interest rate. The good news is that he should recover completely and have a lot of years of normal activity ahead.

Hopefully this normal activity will be him learning to jump down from things a little more gracefully and not hurting himself again.  Wishing him a good week and speedy recovery.