I like cats. I even love my cats, despite the old wisdom stating you should “never love something that can’t love you back.” Saying our cats love me is a stretch.
However, liking cats doesn’t stop me from acknowledging that cats’ mouths are nasty. (This isn’t just a cat thing. One of my professors said, “If you lick the seat of a toilet, it should be the toilet that says, ‘Gross!’” Except of course that toilets don’t talk.)
In addition to cats’ mouths being a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of anaerobic (oxygen-hating) bacteria, cats have pointy little teeth. Dogs’ mouths are just as nasty as cats’, but their teeth are generally thicker and they make big tearing bites, whereas cat bites are almost like little needles piercing your skin. It’s a lot harder to wash bacteria out of little tiny wounds, and the anaerobic bacteria thrive deep in your tissue away from the oxygen that’s at your skin’s surface.
For that reason, if you get a cat bite, particularly on your hand, don’t wait to see if it swells and gets red and warm and painful. If you wait that long, it might be too late and you just may end up getting admitted to the hospital for IV antibiotics and an orthopedic or plastics hand consult for a wash out. No one wants that.
Instead, get an urgent care appointment. Who knows, Amazon might even work for this situation. A reasonable provider will give you a prescription for Augmentin and you’ll kill those bacteria before they can do any damage.
Are you guaranteed to get a dangerous infection if you don’t go on antibiotics? Of course not. But the danger is real, the prevention is relatively safe, and the overall balance of risks and benefits falls on the side of prevention in my book.
SDG