This past week has been a real tough one for me. Last weekend after coming home from a meeting with my new coworkers, I was in such a good mood! The sun was shining, it was my friends birthday and we were going to go bowling, I was ready to conquer the night! When I got home, there was a stray cat in my yard. I’ve seen this cat around before and it liked to have stand offs with my cat, so when I saw them having a stand off again, I tried to get the cat away with a shovel. When it came out from under the car, it started to come up to me and was rubbing on my leg and letting me pet it. Okay now I love animals right so of course I would go to pet it! That was my mistake. As I was going to stand up to go into the house, it changed temper and sprung up and attacked me. Now when I say I got attacked by a cat I mean like MAULED. I tried to get it off but it wouldn’t go. When it finally let go, I looked down and saw what it had down to my hand and arm (I’ll spare you all the gory details but it basically scratched up my whole arm and took a chuck out of my hand).
I went straight to the ER because cat attacks can cause infections FAST (and I was right). Went to the ER, they prescribed me oral antibiotics and off I went. The next day my hand was a balloon that ached all day. I ended up going back to the ER because I could not stand the pain. They then put an IV into my other hand and started to do IV antibiotics. The week was rouuughhh. Not only could I not use my right hand because it was swollen but now I was limited to what I could do because I had an IV in the other hand for a week (which I had to go every night to get treatments). I know this is totally first world problems and people have bigger things to worry about but I just wanted to share this story because the week felt like a year. Although what I went through was bad, it could have been way worse (attack to my face would be hell).
So I guess my message to everyone is: even if cats you see on the street are nice, don’t trust them!! I love cats so much so it’s hard not to stop and pet strays (cat people can attest to this). Now it’s a week and a half later, I finally started to gain back my range of movement in my hand but still have to do bandages changes and go back to the hospital every week for check-ups. Definitely learned a valuable lesion with this one. Sorry for the downer of a post this week but it felt good to put it all into words! Now I can look back and think how far I’ve come with recovery. Thanks for reading!
Carli xox
home for joy 