Last week I wrote about lovely Maisie the tabby cat. I explained that she had presented to us with severe back leg injuries, we had been forced to amputate her right leg – an operation from which she recovered well – but this was only really half of Maisie's story.

Maisie's left back leg had a lot of skin damage over the foot and although my colleague was able to repair parts of it we knew that the wound would breakdown to a certain extent. Most straightforward wounds heal by what is called “first intention” - a simple cut can be stitched back together and heals neatly. But if a wound involves more severe tissue loss or damage it has to heal by “secondary intention” and this is a much slower process. Maisie's wounds were definitely destined to heal by secondary intention so they needed bandages to keep them protected while this process went on. Luckily, as I mentioned before, Maisie is a pleasure to treat; I had to see her back here twice a week for dressing changes.

As is often the case, her wounds looked worse before they looked better – when healing by secondary intention the body produces granulation tissue which is bright pink and looks like something from a horror movie. For the first few dressing changes we just saw increasing amounts of granulation tissue but then after two weeks these areas started to shrink and skin healing started – at last Maisie’s owner could believe me when I said things were improving. Keeping faith when you are the owner of a pet with a slowly healing wound is not easy, Maisie is not yet fully healed, I will update you again next week.