Sunday. Kitty looks much brighter today. She’s pulled through the shock of her attack. But we’ll have to see how she progresses. I expect it’ll get a whole lot worse before it gets better.

If dog-attack cases survive the first 24 hours, unfortunately they’re still only halfway there. The toughest part, in many cases, is yet to come.

I’ll explain: When an animal’s tissues are injured in a fight the blood supply to it can be disrupted. No blood means no oxygen. No oxygen means cell death. Animals can’t deal with extensive death of the cells that make up their tissues. They inevitably die.

In most dog-attack cases, the skin is the injured tissue. Enough skin death and the animal won’t survive.

Right now I’m just working on keeping kitty comfortable and laying a groundwork for the kind of tissue death I’m expecting. She’s getting lots of fluids, antibiotics, and opiate pain relievers. She has a pain patch delivering medication to her bloodstream via the skin of her tail. She gets warm towels and hot water bottles every few hours.

Normally, I like these cases to go to the emergency hospital for the weekend. This owner declined. Sometimes the expense of the critical care service is not doable for many clients. In this case, the

owner just didn’t want to deal with the issue. She needed to go to the hospital to attend to her own wounds. So I get to come to work every few hours around the clock.

I’ll tell you one thing: Not to sound cranky, but I’m definitely not getting paid well enough for this.