Sunday,
January 11, 2008

Okay, could I just get one week off, please?

One single delightful week where there's no emergency or reason for me to be running around trying to put out a fire? Please?

I ask this because my fragile flower of felinity decided to pick this week to start throwing up and dropping dollops of diarrhea on a variety of hard surfaces around the house. Wonderful.

So I hauled him into the vet yesterday, and a rather inexperienced (I will explain this in a bit) but enthusiastic vet found some ulcers at the base of his tongue, probably from the vomiting, and anal glands that were ginormous. The glands were expressed, much to JJ's vocal displeasure, and discharged a surprising amount of gunk that looked like grey clayey mud. Frankly, if I'd had that amount of stuff putting pressure on my rectum I would've been throwing up and squirting out diarrhea as well.

They also took blood and ran some tests to evaluate his organ function. Turns out he was dehydrated (no surprise there), but his thyroid and other organs seemed to be fine, so at least that was a relief. In any case, I was sent home with bottles of of Clinimycin (an antibiotic for any possible GI infection) and a refill on his Amitryptiline, as well as instructions to keep him on a bland diet of strained turkey baby food and unflavored Pedialyte.

As it turns out, JJ has a new favorite treat -- he lapped up the turkey like it was going out of style, and even tucked into the Pedialyte after some initial hesitation. As Lyndon pointed out, if a salty liquid tastes good your electrolytres really are out of whack. The Clinimycin, however, turned out to come in capsules -- smallish capsules, true, but too damn large to safely get down a cat's throat. I tried mixing a capsule's contents into some turkey, but JJ turned his nose up at it, and with good reason -- the Clinimycin made the turkey hideously bitter.

(Well, of course I taste-tested it. What kind of a cat mommy do you think I am?)

In any case I wasn't going to try poking a whole capsule down JJ's throat. I don't really understand what the vet was thinking when she dispensed capsules for a cat -- I did ask for pills, but if I'd known the size of the damn things I would've asked for liquid instead. However, the expression of his anal glands seems to have helped a huge amount -- he's not crapping all over the house anymore and he hasn't vomited once since he got hom. He has a return checkup appointment for 7:00 AM *sigh* on Saturday morning -- if he's all clear then, we won't fuss about the antibiotics.

So, what's up with y'all?

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