Help Storm Overcome His Coyote Attack

In the early morning of May 12th, around 4:30am, Storm was attacked by a coyote right in front of our house in North Queen Anne.

Storm let out one scream, and within 5 seconds, Jayne had rushed out the front door, barefoot, only to see Storm hanging by the head from the mouth of a medium sized coyote. Jayne charged the coyote, which retreated halfway down the block before dropping Storm. He was in horrible shape. Bloody, limp, in shock...but breathing.

We rushed him to the nearest emergency vet within minutes. The next 12 hours are a blur, but by the time they gave us his prognosis, it looked like he was going to be paralyzed from the neck down. I don't like to think about it, but that night we had to consider letting him go.

The beautiful little guy kept fighting though, and by the morning, he had recovered enough motor control to mostly sit up, and had even eaten some food! They brought him out to us, and we could see glimmers of our old Storm inside. He even started purring as soon as they handed him to us!

The ER docs thought it was a spinal cord injury, so we transferred him to a neurologist for a CT scan to see if they could do anything to get him to walk again.

The coyote had fractured his skull, puncturing into the brain near his right ear.

The injury to the right side of his brain meant the left side of his body was not operating properly, but they say animals can re-learn motor skills, so we authorized brain surgery to remove any pieces of skull that might be lacerating the brain. (sorry if this is graphic)

The financial cost was extreme, but by this point, word had spread about "the woman who charged a coyote to save her cat," and the vets were using words like "remarkable" to describe his recovery.

Saving Storm was the best thing we have ever done.

For a week he has been back home, mostly curled up sleeping, but when awake he is alert and as cuddly as ever. He purrs the instant you start petting him...but there's still a lot of recovery left.

His first attempts at walking definitely suffered from the impaired control on his left side.

But check this out! After having him home for only one week, he can already walk around, and even jump just high enough to cause trouble.

Storm lost 8 of his 9 lives, but it looks like he will recover, which is a happier ending than I could have possibly imagined.

And....his vet bills total over $17k. The emergency overnight vet was over $5000, and the estimate for the neurologist was $10k low, and $20k high. Unexpectedly, he came in on the low end!

They let us finance 10k on some "CareCredit" loan at the vet, and the rest maxed out a couple credit cards.

The debt won't cripple us, but if anyone wants to chip in, this did all hit really hard, really fast.