Zoe made his routine visit to the vet on Wednesday. He feels more comfortable if he stays in his carrier.

Everything went pretty well at first. They took blood and stuck a thermometer up his … well, you know. And the doctor saw …

His ear!

I had just found a scab in his ear while we were waiting for the vet to come into the exam room. When the vet saw it, he ripped the scab off and said there was an infection, and he needed to clean it out and stitch it. That meant the vet had to put him under, and Zoe had to spent the night.

WHAT!

He was ready to be picked up Thursday morning. We expected it to be expensive. The total for his shots and exam and the surgery was $457. Ouch. Way too much money! But we had to do it.

Here he is at home afterwards.

You can see the stitched wound in his ear and you might be able to tell that the side of his head was shaved.

We think he got into a fight with one of the other male cats and got a claw in the ear. We don’t know whether it was Smokey, Sylvester, or even Dusty. We know that Smokey and Sylvester jump on the other cats and on each other, but we haven’t seen Dusty do anything like that. So it was probably Smokey or Sylvester.  Mark suggests that we check under their claws for Zoe’s DNA.