No Volume Control

Meet Inka..

Yes, her ear is the problem. We have been fighting ear mites for a while now.. I would have them under control by washing their ears out with baby oil. But the ear mites would always come back.. Over the past 6 weeks, i haven't been doing my job. What she has is called an ear hematoma. Basically when she was shaking her head hard, or digging in her ear, a blood vessel in her ear burst and filled her ear with fluid. There is no home remedy for this one. This afternoon she goes for her first visit to the vet since she got spayed 6 years ago.. (i know it's not good that she doesn't visit a vet regularly, but she is a strictly indoor cat, so the chance of her catching something was very slim... or at least i thought it was very slim.) The vet will drain her ear, stitch her up and she should be ready to come back home with a dose of antibiotics, and probably some cream. Hopefully she won't need a cone.

As you can (kind of) see in the picture below, her entire ear flap is swollen. So swollen in fact that it can not stand straight up, and it bounces when she walks. When it's down it covers the entire opening of her ear.
I'm extremely nervous about the whole thing. I have no idea what to expect, and no idea how itwill go, or how she will react. Plus the appt is at a pretty bad time - the girls get off the bus right when we have to leave for the appt, so hopefully we can time it well. We didn't have much choice in times.. i needed it either early morning or late afternoon / evening and within a few days because leaving it could cause more problems.. They are booked solid for early morning / evening appts until mid october. So i took the next best one, and didn't really think too clearly about it. Hopefully the timing works out well because i would rather not take her alone there.

Send some good luck vibes for my kitty. And as bad as it is to say this, it almost sucks that this happened to her.. Not for the pain, or the problems or anything like that.. but because she isn't the greatest kitty.. She is not social with the girls.. Barely social with us. She isn't a cuddly, playful, friendly cat. She hides in the basement all day..comes out after the girls are in bed, but generally doesn't hang around enough to even be pet.. I have to catch her (she is slow, so it isn't hard), just to pet her. But she is part of the family, so it's not like we can drop her off at the humane society or give her away to another family in hopes that they will treat her because chances are, they wouldn't. *sigh* So we will treat this via the draining, but if it turns out she needs surgery to fix it, we would have a hard time dealing with that.