I will spare you the icky details, (they are very icky), but he needed an emergency surgery on Friday afternoon and another on Sunday night. Jason came home Tuesday evening and is doing remarkably well. He is on three different medications, one of which is basically morphine for cats and he seems to be enjoying it. I can tell because he lets me give it to him without any fuss.
This weekend made me realize that the pets in our house get treated less like pets and more like family members. I am very proud of that and I'm grateful that we had the resources to enable such treatment. I started this post thinking I could make some deep comments about typical treatment of non-human animals. I think that all I want to say is that there are four members of our family and two of them happen to be fuzzier than the other two. After this weekend I am really grateful that there are still four of us.
2 comments:
I am really glad that Jason is ok. Give him an extra pet for me, and give yourself a hug from me.
I do kinda want the icky details though....at least what was making him so sick!
Ok, so part of the problem was that they were getting dry cat food, (I know it's bad... i feel like a terrible cat mommy). And another part of the problem was that the food was too rich, so when all these vitamins and minerals made it to his bladder there was too much "stuff" and not enough moisture. Crystals then formed, they got stuck in his urethra and prevented him from urinating. This is where it got dangerous -- if I hadn't noticed that he couldn't pee (or if he hadnt tried to pee outside of the litterbox, which caused me to notice), his bladder could have ruptured which would have been a slow and painful death because there's really nothing you can do after your bladder explodes.
He had to be catheterized twice to flush out all the crystals, (this was the surgery I mentioned), they had to do it twice because they missed a bunch of stuff the first time. Then the attached an IV bag and filled him full of fluids so that he would urinate on his own.
He and Medea are now on different (wet) food that is supposed to be reduce the alkalinity of the urine which also prevents crystalization. I will probably leave them on this for two or three months and then I may switch them to a raw foods diet. I'm just hesitant to do anything other than what the vet says because we spent the equivalent of two months rent keeping him alive. We're certainly glad we did it, but we would really prefer not to have to do it again.
Also, it seems I am lacking an invitation to your new blog. Ahem.. pretty please?
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