my favorite quote by Wayne Pacelle, which was said to me as he, Mike Markarian and I were walking into a restaurant for lunch; “You can accomplish anything, if you don’t care who gets the credit for it.”

 

I don’t care who gets the credit for ending the trade in exotic cats as pets, props and parts.  I just want it done, NOW!

 

Cats are amazing!  Their ability to heal themselves, and others, is beyond compare.  Priya Tigress arrived with a 20 lb infection in her uterine horns and we removed it the next day, but her infection was resistant to the array of antibiotics we tried.  Her body was so seeped in the bacteria that her stitches could not hold and she had to undergo surgery again to seal the wound.  Meanwhile the bacteria was cultured and we found a better antibiotic for it and began treatment.

 

Priya did better, and we thought she was healing because she was no longer seeping from the incision and her appetite and temperament improved immensely.  However, a week before she was to be released back to her earthen floored enclosure, keepers noted a pink slit in the stitches.  Due to her baggy belly folding on either side of the gap, it was hard to get a photo of it to see the extent.  Priya seemed be getting more and more uncomfortable and began to refuse food unless coaxed extensively.

 

I noticed a change in her sleeping habits.  She began to sleep on her back, with legs splayed wide.  It gave me a better opportunity to get a photo of the opening incision, which led our vet team to decide that surgery was again needed to close the wound.  What I didn’t know at the time was Priya’s wisdom in dealing with her own injury.

 

We went into surgery thinking it would be a minor issue of putting in a couple of stitches to close the gap again, but what Dr. Justin Boorstein saw, made him say that her prognosis of survival was not good.  He was clearly distressed when he saw that the tissues had separated to the point that air was seeping into the open layer between her skin and her muscle.  When he invited me to touch her skin and feel the crackling of it, as the air was compressed beneath my touch, I was horrified.  I’d never felt anything so foreign to the feel of a sleekly muscled and furred cat.

 

The air, and any impurity in it, was filling her body and making it even harder for the antibiotics to work; making it harder for Priya to call on her own immune system to heal.  Then it dawned on me that she was laying on her back to try and force the air back out, through the hole in her belly where it had entered.  There was no other way out.  Standing, sitting or laying in a normal cat loaf style would not help her express the air that was building up under her skin and causing her so much discomfort.  How amazing!

 

Surgery lasted about an hour and a half and by the end Dr Boorstein was somewhat more encouraged that she may survive.  During the first repair, the week or so after her original surgery, he could reach his arms into the gap up to his elbows.  Now he could only reach in to his wrists.  She was healing, but ever so slowly.  He also found the tissue to be healthier than he had expected, so there is good reason to think it can bond fully this time.  Only time will tell, but thanks to our expert vets, on site hospital, excellent equipment and the loving care of the volunteers, Priya has a good chance of living a long healthy life at Big Cat Rescue.

 

When Gabrielle and Priya arrived from Big Cats of Serenity Springs in Nov. 2016, both were obese, but their bellies looked particularly distended.  When we found that to be a 20 lb hydrometra in Priya, we feared we would find the same in Gabrielle when she was examined on Dec 12, 2016.  Thankfully, after running blood work, urinalysis, X-rays and a sonogram that was guided by our remote assistants at Oncura Partners, we discovered that she was just fat and not suffering an infection that required the removal of her uterus.  She’s going to be twenty next month, so t