Poggles' Third Vet Visit of the Year

Poggles is now three years old and in this single year, he has had 3 vet visits so far.  Old age sure isn't cheap!

I went to check on him one night before heading to bed and found him sitting in his litter box with blood all around him.  There were two full sized toe nails on the litter around him.  Ouch...  This is the photo after I washed all the blood off his fur and feet.  You can see how red his foot is from the injury. 

The next day, I found two large patches of blood on his linens.  He had removed two more toe nails and his foot was all bitten up.  There looked like a gash on the palm of his foot.  The wound was still oozing and his leg was quite swollen.

Poggy got a foot bath, this time in saline solution - twice.  Then I applied Polysporin original formula to his foot in a nice, thick coat.  I tried to create a bandage dressing, but he was not being cooperative at all and kept flinging it off.

Here he is flailing about.

He looks rather funny.

He kept stretching his legs out like this and trying to turn (unsuccessfully) onto his side.

I was holding him steady from underneath so he finally gave up.

Here he is giving me the finger, er, foot.

He looks like a potato...

Afterwards, I held him on my lap tummy-up for a while so that the Polysporin could have a chance to do it's job.

He was kind of chill about it. 

Well, hello there! 

Look at those cute little feet.  The injured foot doesn't look so bad now that it's coated with Polysporin, but you can tell that it's more swollen than the other foot. 

I let him lie on his side afterwards and sleep.  When he tried to walk, I noticed that he keeps the injured leg tucked up against his body and his uninjured back leg kind of drags behind, weakly pushing him along.  He's basically dragging himself forward with his front legs.  It looks really sad.

I took out his litter pan and put two sheets of paper towel down so that he doesn't have to struggle to climb into the litter pan.  This caused him to poop outside the confines of the litter box area, but he still smartly peed on the paper towel only.

His vet was closed for the day and the emergency vets were unfamiliar with hedgehogs.  So I kept washing his legs with saline and re-applying Polysporin three times a day.  The bleeding stopped and the swelling went down a bit, but the foot still looked ugly.

He went to the vet today and the vet says that his foot is swollen and looks infected at the front.  I was thinking about how much worse it would have looked if I hadn't washed that wound three times a day and applied Polysporin.  I'm pretty glad that I have some nursing skills to attempt to apply to Poggy.  

Poggy got an antibiotic shot and something for pain and inflammation.  He also got some medicine to take home - little doses of anti-inflammatory/pain medication and some special chlorhexidine detergent to wash his wound in place of saline solution. 

I hope Poggy will be okay.  He has finally fully woken up from being put under (gassed) at the vet.  He was really groggy before.  The vet says that he is otherwise very healthy... although the vet did say that Poggy is a little bit fat now.  He gained an extra 30 g since his last visit.  Hee hee... maybe I overcompensated a little from the last time he was sick and didn't eat.

Poor little friend!