What A Ham

The hospital is really busy right now (major surgeries booking into October), including lots of big patients (some have been bigger than me!) and that means the space is at a premium even just for me to walk around.  But sometimes I need to do something other than sew and writing up the stories of patients is one of my happy procrastinations where I don’t feel too guilty for letting them sit.  So thank you for being a reader, and letting me procrastinate with a bit less guilt! 😊

I have two recent stories I really wanted to share, so here is the first, the story of a mouse.

Unlike the patients above, Mouser is actually fairly small. Not tiny, but about ten inches tall. His person first wrote back in 2020, when Mouser was 29 years old. He had had an unfortunate run-in with a dog. Here are the diagnosis photos from then:

She also sent a photo of a similar (though not quite the same) younger mouse as a comparison:

We all know how 2020 went, so Mouser didn't come in then, but six years later (he’d been kept in a safe space all that time) his person wrote back. She was finally ready to send him to the hospital.

We agreed that the best treatment would be:

Repair injured foot

Recover both footpads

Fix finger toe stitches

Repair muzzle with new nose

Two new ears

Repair arm with new hand pad

Repair tail attachment

Gentle spa

Of course, these were subject to change as treatment proceeded (and you’ll see they did a bit) but that was the plan.

He took a short flight down the coast from Washington and started his treatment with a gentle spa. Here he is in his bubble bath:

You can sort of see in the photo, he’s kind of a bluish gray, which I couldn’t match exactly for his new ears and back of his missing hand, so there were two choices for his human to choose from:

She chose the shorter fur and surgery proceeded. I had a really good match for his pawpads.

Here's his heart being made and installed with a bit of original stuffing:

And here were his initial chubbiness approval pics:

He still needed some new toes and fingers:

And new whiskers:

And then, he was ready to fly home! His person wrote: He looks amazing!

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North West basement 3

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Was working on book 2 and got to a heavy part, so I took a break to draw something cute... and a random lawrence + milly!

A lot of my patients fly in solo, from all over the globe. But this one was a local bear who needed help.

You can see he’s pretty chubby, but he’d lost some stuffing from gravitational settling, particularly on his head and joints. His seams were suffering from the expansion (not just the ones in the photo). These were all treatable issues. He did have some light scarring on the side of his face from a previous accident, but the fur still felt nice, so treating it would be more invasive, and so I didn’t recommend that.

It took some time for him to come in, because his person, who is quite young, wasn’t ready for him to be gone for long, and so not only were there timing issues, but there was a question as to whether to have him cleaned as well, which would extend his stay. Eventually, everyone was ready and one Wednesday afternoon, after his youngster’s school, he was dropped off.

He started his care with the spa:

All new stuffing once he was dry relieved the lumpiness in his pre-op photos. But he still got a small amount of original stuffing in a heart in his chest:

Once restuffed, it was time to minimize his older seam scarring, and tighten up his other seams. Here he is, all better:

He went home to a very happy little girl and her family. They wrote:

He looks fantastic and D is so happy to have him back looking and feeling like new.

Thank you so much for your work on this.

They also asked for his story to be shared, so this is for D and her teddy bear. :-)

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