Health? For the record

[redbird]

Earlier this afternoon, I picked up julian_tiger to snuggle him. After a minute, he decided he wanted to get down; somehow, in the course of this, his claw pricked my shoulder.

This happens moderately often, and is not a big deal: a minute or two later and we've both forgotten all about it.

This time, it still hurt after a few minutes, so I asked cattitude for a kiss-make-better, which he did. Maybe ten minutes after that, I noticed that it was itching significantly, and decided to put camphor* on it. To do so, I took my shirt off and looked in the bathroom mirror so I'd know where to apply it.

There were two significant raised, pink blotches on my shoulder. Cattitude confirmed that they hadn't been there when he kissed it. I applied camphor, as planned, and went looking for an antihistamine. When I found we didn't have any, Cattitude offered to go out and get some. He was all set to walk to the pharmacy--most of a kilometer--in the cold, but I pointed out that the store downstairs might have it. They did. He came back with two of those single-dose foil packets, each containing two Benadryl pills. I took one pill, taped the packet closed, and went on to a game of Scrabble.

The welts are basically gone, and my shoulder no longer itches. I have no idea what, if anything, this means--but it seems worth having a record of.

*Brand name Camphophenique; that and calamine lotion were the topical anti-itch things of my childhood, and at the time I preferred the calamine.

Comments

[frostfox.livejournal.com]

Spookie had *very* sharp paws and, before Max hospitalised me, the worse cat related injury I had was a nasty abscess on my collar bone from a Spookie scratch, I still have the scar, so never treat any cat scratch lightly.

FF

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

That looks suspiciously like a mild allergic reaction. (That = the raised pink blotches around the scratch, going away with benadryl.) If you aren't allergic to the cat at other times, you might be reacting to something the cat stepped in. Unfortunately, it's hard to ask Julian where he's been putting his claws.

[annafdd.livejournal.com]

Could be an allergic reaction but cat scratches, even shallow ones from house cats, can be dangerous, and infect really easily. I had one bottle of disinfectant upstairs and one downstairs precisely for the routine dousing of Zip-induced scratches. When I stayed in Manhattan cat-sitting I didn't have the disinfectant, and the first thing that Beamer did was bite my hand (hurried familiarity on my part) and turn it into a bloated infected mess. Which is why I now own a small tube of large-spectrum antibiotics and foaming disinfectant, both bought back then and living since in my travelling bag.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Campophenique? Oh, swell. Now I'm going to have The Singing Nun going through my head all morning.