Tuesday 24th December 2019

Bella the dog, aka Houdini hound, made yet another bid for freedom last week.

I arrived home on Tuesday to see her bounding up the road to greet my car, tail all waggy and excited as she anticipated showing off her latest cleverness. This time she'd somehow rammed the metal sheeting on the bottom of the garden gate hard enough to rip it off! What exactly is going on at night? Are there half a dozen foxes lined up outside, enticing her with their bushy tails? An hour later the gate was mended with a double layer of chicken wire fastened tightly all around the gate frame. Let's see how long that holds her.

This was actually just the beginning of a few days of incidents. Wednesday lunchtime a large group of us were planning to meet up in Dryanovo for a Christmas lunch. I'd had a good scrub the night before and just needed to wash my hair, so, as usual, I got up, got the kitchen fire going and made a cup of tea. By this time the kindling was ablaze and so I delved into the sack of wood for some heftier chunks to build the fire up. I pulled out a strange shaped piece, almost like someone had cut a round knot off a tree branch. Was it actually wood or a chunk of stone? I tapped it gently against the stove and it just made a muffled thud. Definitely not a rock so it must be wood, and into the fire it went whilst I headed back upstairs with mug of tea and a couple of rich tea biscuits to watch the morning news.

Sitting on my bed I couldn't help but notice that the smell of smoke was getting steadily stronger. Very strange, as normally you only get the odd whiff when the fire is first started, and mine had been going a good half hour by now. I headed downstairs to investigate and was horrified to find a thick layer of smoke in the kitchen and more still pouring from all the sides of the stove top. Quickly I opened the doors and windows before opening the door to the fire itself to see what was happening. Dense smoke billowed out as I quickly slammed the door shut and headed into the garden. How could a few sticks still be burning so brightly after so long? They should be mere embers by now. And what was with all the smoke? Was the chimney blocked?

In the garden I stepped away from the house to study the chimney and was troubled to see the dark brown smoke rising out from it. What the heck was I burning? The animals and I all just sat outside and waited for the amount of smoke in the kitchen to subside. Once it was slightly less noxious I went back in and once again checked the fire. It was still burning as brightly as ever, and worse, chunks of fire seemed to be dripping down into the ash pan and continuing to burn in there. That's when it dawned on me what must have happened. The mysterious flat disc of wood was in fact a horrible chunk of rubber! I got a bit panicky at this point about the poisonous fumes and how long it would burn for, and threw some water into the ash pan to try and douse the flames there, and in the hopes that the resulting steam would also dampen the fire above. It sizzled wildly and started to drip out on the floor. Nothing else to do but to wait it out.

It must have been a good hour later before the rubber had finally finished burning, or at least any remnants had finished flowing into the ash pan. With oven gloves I carried it out into the garden and then drowned it liberally in cold water.

A lovely layer of molten rubber and ash

With a stick I managed to poke out the cooled rubber which came out in a solid sheet, and added stove cleaning to my list of jobs for later. At least the water on the stove was scalding hot ready for that much needed hair wash!

The next day I spent a few hours cleaning out the stove and all the pipes, as well as washing the kitchen surfaces and vacuuming everywhere, after which the house smelt a bit less like a tyre yard.

All was quiet for a day and then possibly the saddest incident of all. It concerned a little stray cat who had taken to joining in with my three for feeding.

Mine don't seem to mind her, and so I made up a little bed for her in the barn near the other cat beds where she seems to have been sleeping for a week or so. Well I hadn't noticed her for a couple of days, but didn't think anything of it, after all she has her own territory and routines I suppose.

Thursday was lovely and sunny again, so after doing some shifting of more junk I made a coffee and went to sit in the veggie patch section with the dogs. I sat for about two minutes in the sun before feeling way too hot, so picked up the coffee and went for a wander in the shade. As I neared the biggest barn I heard a little mewing noise and recognised it straight away as the stray. I spotted her peeping out from behind some timbers and made some encouraging noises for her to come out, wondering what she was doing tucked away in there. That's when I spotted her foot.

It was quite bloody and swollen and looked like it had been crushed right across the knuckles. Oh you silly girl I thought, I bet you've tried to get some meat off a rat trap and got your foot caught! I went to get her pot of biscuits to entice her out further so I could see how bad the damage was. On doing so I then noticed the inside of her other leg was also missing a big section of skin. Yikes! Rattling the pot of biscuits had of course attracted the attention of the dogs, and when she saw them she shot off around the corner of the barn. As she went passed me my stomach lurched as I saw one of her back legs was dangling and completely the wrong way round.

I ran to get a cat carrier and shooed the dogs out of the way. Thankfully she hadn't gone far and after I put some biscuits in the carrier she made her way in there and curled up on the blanket. Straightaway we headed to the nearest vet who was just about to start an operation on another cat, so we waited till he'd finished.

His prognosis on examining the little cat was that her leg had been broken at the hip and would need plating to fix it, something he didn't have the equipment to do. I asked about amputation but he said that wasn't a good option for the cat and that it should be fixed. The only thing he could do was to give me the phone number of a veterinary hospital in Stara Zagora, 100km away across the mountain. I set off back home with the cat feeling very despondant and worried about her, especially as I could now smell the infection from her wounds. Partway home I decided to try another vet in Veliko Tarnovo, and pulled over to phone them. They said to bring her through so they could take a look.

An hour later we were there, where they anaesthetised her straightaway so they could x-ray the injuries. Despite the nasty cuts to her front feet there was only one broken bone there, but unfortunately they were quite badly infected. The vet said that they could amputate the broken back leg, which wasn't a problem, but that it would be touch and go as to whether they could save the front feet because of the infection. If I wanted to try then they would need to keep her there and do daily repeated cleaning of the wounds to try and save her. I said that while ever there was a chance she could survive then to try.

That was five days ago. Because of Christmas she's been allowed home today and tomorrow, and is now living in a garden storage box in the kitchen, with a cone around her head to stop her getting at the wounds. She looks a bit of a mess, poor little thing, but she's able to hobble around and is eating like crazy (which explains the appallingly stinky huge poop she just did). I've got some ointment to put on her wounds twice a day, and the badly damaged right paw has to be massaged before this. On Friday she's to go back for a check-up where they'll decide whether she needs to be re-admitted or whether she can continue being at home.

Everyone, meet Sukie, the cat who definitely only has eight lives left!