For a young cat, Timmy had really had more than his fair share of trips to the vet even before his latest troubles started.

Most of the visits had been for trouble with his ears or skin. As a kitten he had caught ear mites from the farm cat mother who gave birth to him. When he came for his first inoculation at nine weeks old I had noticed his irritable ears full of black wax. A look inside his ears with an otoscope had revealed the tiny white ear mites that cause so much irritation and trouble. As I had watched they had started to crawl away from the sudden bright light.

He is a wonderfully placid and good-natured tabby cat and he had been a model patient while his owner put the drops I prescribed in his ear twice a day for a month. Six weeks later I had looked down his ears and pronounced the mites cured.

Next he had caught fleas. He was allergic to them so that they did not just make him itch, he developed spots on his back and neck. I had treated him with a spray to kill the fleas and tablets to control the allergy, but it had still needed several months of treatment before I had been able to sign him off.

For a few months all seemed well, then a couple of weeks ago he developed ear trouble again. This time when I looked inside his ear with my otoscope there were no mites and none of the black wax. Instead the depths of both ears were full of white smelly pus. The right ear was the most painful. He was holding his head on one side and cried when I touched the side of his head.

His ears were too painful for me to look properly with him fully conscious but I took a swab to culture the germs that were causing the problem and arranged to give him an anaesthetic the next morning.

Once he was asleep I was able to clean his ears out, look properly and take x-rays of the bones that encase the middle and inner ear. They showed that the infection had spread into his middle ear. The infection had also affected the nerves to his right eye which pass through the middle ear, so that he had unequal pupils and his right eyelid drooped.

I had already started treating him with antibiotic injections on the first day I saw him and the laboratory tests confirmed that the germs were sensitive to the antibiotic I had used. I was very worried that the infection might spread to his inner ear and affect his balance or even along the nerves and cause a meningitis.

For the next four days the thoroughly miserable Timmy sat in his hospital cage on a drip while I gave him antibiotics, fluids and drugs to control the inflammation. On the third day he began to look a little better and actually looked at the morsels we offered to tempt his appetite. Now he is well on the road to recovery although the infection could easily recur.

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