Feet...paws, legs, joints and being paralyzed #1...Boogars feet

Boogar has been running around using his front legs for 13 years. If you pick him up (and he doesn't bite you) & look him over you will notice several scars.
A few of them are amazingly stupid, the ones on his back where he leaned against a heater; little patches of white furn in the black...it great big one on his belly where he crawled on a heat disk, fell asleep (and of course I didn't know this) burned his belly and lost a big chunk of skin, making his boy cat nipples all out of alignment..that was a great and fun surgery...and his feet.

Examine Boogar's hind feet. Boogar is polydactile, which means he has extra toes, lots of them on all four feet. He was born with normal, extra toed feet. But his hind feet now are missing toes, scarred, curled under and look a little deformed. One must stay wrapped at all times.

Think about it. He has little or no functional feeling in his feet, so as he runs around the world, what happens? He can't place his feet properly so the tough pad on the bottom contacts the floor, he can't move his toes...so what happens? He's still using his feet and they are meant to be on the ground, right?

Not really. Look at your own feet. The tops are pretty soft, even if you spend all of your time barefoot and outdoors, the tops are just skin. The bottoms, the soles of your feet are tough, hardened, and thick..they are for walking on.
Imagine turning your feet upside down and walking on the tops of them, the skin. Imagine this not hurting, rather being mostly numb. What would happen to the skin on the top of your feet?
It would wear, shred, get road rash, form ulcers and generally not work really well for walking.

This happens to the rear feet of paralyzed cats.

One of the side effects of rear limb paralysis is 'knuckling', the rear feet turn under and do not place correctly on the ground. Toe tops and foot tops contact the ground. The hair might protect them for awhile, and maybe the cats ability to shift foot position might spread the damage over enough of an area so ulcers don't occur...but maybe not.

As a kitten, before I took him, Boogar had worn off his toes on his back feet. Several of them were black rotting stumps with bone sticking out the ends. OK, so his caretaker didn't know, and he didn't feel it. But he had 'walked' them off, trying to learn to get around as a 4 week old broken kitten. So, off they came and his feet healed.

But as he grew, even though he had learned to walk, sort of like how a frog hops around, he wa sunable to learn to place his feet properly enough to keep them safe.

At first he just bruised the tops of them. Next he wore the hair off. One day, he tore one open.

So, I bandaged them. OK, wrapping and bandaging a cat foot is an exercise in inventiveness. They don't like it. It thumps, drags, annoys them, chases them, entertains them with a chew toy and so on. Boogar required one foot to always be bandages, and his other foot to be bandaged intermittently.

We tried traditional tape and gause bandages...and he got tape sores. We tried baby socks, and he either got them we or yanked them off. We tried layers of tape on the top of his foot to simulate a paw pad..and this worked a while, but...
One day he got a grain of sand under his tape paw pad. Now I changed them once a week, because this preserved the hair and skin. But a few days into his newest tape creation, top of foot only paw pad, his foot swelled up. It couldn't be constricted, because the tape was only a layered up skid pad on the top of his foot.

I pulled it off and found a green, deep ulcer the size of the tip of my finger, going to his bone. Infected, rotting tissue. OK, barf, it stank and I cleaned it out and went to several weeks of sugar/ honey wraps. Sugar or honey accelerate tissue healing. I'll talk more about the how to in another blog.

His foot sort of healed, and sort of didn't.  It would close and scar, and then re-open even though it was always fully wrapped and padded now.

What happened is that he had a staph infection brewing. More on Staph and MRSA infections another time.

So, after years of debriding, cleaning, patching, bandaging, tape burns, fur loss and shaking my head I found something that works.

3M makes a skin tape called  medipore tape (link goes straight to 3m product description) which sticks to itself, sticks to skin and hair, is thin, light, flexible, it breaths and it tears off in perforated strips the right size to wrap a cat paw in.

Now Boogar wears one paw wrapped. It anywhere from a week to a month, and it comes on and off easy. His foot is healed underneath and has been so for a year. The tape is not so bulky that it catches on stuff, risking him pulling and dislocating his hip or ankle (more on joints in another blog) but solid enough to protect his foot.

Most cats than can not walk normally will get to a place where one or both rear feet get damaged. This is a possible solution to prevent it.

Here's what foot damage can look like.... and this is mild.