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At 1am Monday night/Tuesday morning, I heard a loud scrabbling/scraping followed by a thud. And then another louder, more frantic scrabbling/scraping and no thud. Usually, noises like this mean either that the cats, Mira & Camille, are having a good time or I have a very inept burgler in the house. I usually ignore it & go back to sleep. This time, I decided to get up & find out what the cats had knocked over or if one of them was stuck in the bathtub.
I found Mira pacing in the bathroom. No Camille. I looked in the bathtub. No Camille. I quickly went through the rest of the house. No Camille. Well, if she wasn't inside the house she must be outside. I went outside & found Camille trying to walk up the 3 flights of stairs to my door. Since Camille (to my knowledge) does not know anything about teleportation, I concluded that she had fallen/jumped out the bathroom window, 3 stories above an asphalt drive.
Finding it impossible to return the way she had come, she was now trying to climb the stairs to make it back home. She was sprawled across two steps. Her breath was short & shallow. She was making funny 'huh huh huh' noises. Not good. I gently picked her up, brought her inside & placed her on the living room floor. Mira & I both looked at her. Mira hissed. I called the vet.
Fortunately, there is an emergency vet just a few blocks from my house. I pulled out Camille's travelling box & she took a few short steps away from me. While I found it encouraging that she was aware enough to recognize that this meant I was going to take her in the car (one of her less favorite places) and that she was able to walk, after a fashion, her movement made it slightly more difficult to catch her & put her in the box for the ride to the vet. I did catch her & carefully closed the travelling box.
At the Pet Emergency Hospital, she was still breathing kinda funny although she had stopped making those huffing noises. The vet started poking & prodding, feeling for anything that could be in the wrong place. He placed her on the floor & waited to see what she would do. She started walking, slowly. She also started losing all of her fur. The vet said that is a common reaction to a severe trauma. I was about to have a hairless cat.
Well, it all turned out just fine. Everything on the x-rays came out fine. No broken bones. No signs of internal bleeding. Camille showed hour by hour improvement in her ability to walk, recognize her surroundings, etc. Today, she's back to leaping on the counters & purring loudly enough to wake me up at night. However, I don't think I'll see her anywhere near that window again.
7/21/96condo_outside