Poor Alex, Part 2

Well, it's been an eventful time these past few days in my normally-calm household. You may remember my most recent entry about Alex's misadventures, resulting in his abscessed ear. By Sunday night, and even with a bright yellow cone around his head to protect him from himself, things were not improving. So we went to the vet at 7 a.m. Monday morning, they kept him until 3 p.m. and ... well, a dose of anesthesia and several stitches later, I went to pick him up. We go back in 10 to 12 days to remove the stitches. The cone - a clear one, now - stays on until then (so he doesn't scratch the stitches out and we have to start all over). Here he is, this a.m.:

(You can't really see it in this photo, but he has quite an impressive set of stitches going down the right side of his face - made that much more impressive by the fact that all the fur has been shaved away.)

Poor Alex. He is so completely miserable. He doesn't even really want to go outside. He is trying to sleep the whole thing off, but he can't sleep all day long... so the mornings have become his time of day to meow very pathetically, not even strongly, to let me know that life is not good right now. I see his point. He walks as little as possible, and he looks like a drunken sailor when he does walk - even with the clear cone, I guess it's hard for him to see. And then the cone knocks into things when he walks, which just jars him. Then at night, it's like having a newborn in the house (or what I imagine that might be like, since I never actually had one). He sleeps curled up to me as close as he can get, but can't really sleep soundly, so we both end up waking up every hour or two. The inconvenience to me is nothing compared to the misery for him, I'm sure.

But this too shall pass, Alex. It will be a faint memory of the past, as though it passed right on through. Maybe we'll even laugh, the further down the road this becomes, as we remember what it was without all the drama attached. Well, and the photos bring a smile to my face already. Sorry, guy! But they do. Poor Alex.