Just a little venting

Okay... those of you who hate to read about a person expressing personal misery over the injustice and trials of the universe... stop now and move onto another blog.

Those of you who don't like to think about animals in distress, you may wish to skip this one as well... it won't be pleasant.

Here's the story. Our cat, Questor (pictured above) is obviously a long hair breed... not pure-bred I'm sure, but with a healthy dose of Maine Coon in his DNA. So he's big and he's strong and he's furry. So furry in fact, that his hair is predisposed to matting, and try as we might, sometimes he just won't let us comb out all the matts. So, a point comes every couple of years or so where we just take him to the vet, have him sedated and shaved. Which we did a couple of weeks ago. While we had him there at the vet, we also had his teeth cleaned and some basic blood tests run to check his health. All around, other than being a couple pounds overweight, they gave him a very good bill of health, and now with his fur shaved off, we figured he'd just be a really happy kitty.

Not quite. We brought him home, and his third eyelid on his right eye was looking a little weird. It was constantly pulled up covering half to three-fourths of his eye, and it looked horrible. I took some pictures, and for all purposes and intents, he looks like something out of a George A. Romero movie. We figured there was still some residual anesthetic in his system, so we wait a day before calling the vet and asking them if this is "normal."

Yes, they tell us. He probably hasn't quite metabolized all of the anesthetic out yet, so watch him for a couple of days and if there's no improvement, bring him back in.

So we wait a couple of days, and there is no improvement, so we take him back in. They prod his eye, swab his eye, dye his eye, shine a light in his eye, examine the third eyelid, rinse the eye and finally decide it's most likely a bacterial infection. They prescribe an ointment to put on his eyeball three times a day and tell us he should be better in a week. Huzzah.

Except I have to go out of town for the weekend, and I don't consider it fair to give the job of administering eyeball ointment to my friends who usually feed the cat while we're gone. So instead, I have him boarded at the vet. $14 dollars a day, plus $2 per day to give him the medication they sold us. Okay. Fine.

So, I come back from the weekend and pick him up. His eye is no better. They tell me it should be okay by the end of the week, if not call. End of the week rolls around (last Friday) and it's not better. I call. I take him in.

They prod his eye, swab his eye, dye his eye, shine a light in his eye, examine the third eyelid, rinse the eye and finally decide to run another blood test... this time specifically for leukemia and immune-deficiency viruses. The test for kitty HIV comes back positive. Bummer. Our cat has managed to pick up the feline version of AIDS, and this is probably the root cause for the eye problem. So now they prescribe no less than THREE new medications.

One is an oral paste, twice a day. I don't know how many of you have ever tried to get a cat to eat something the cat does NOT want to eat, but the end result is usually more of the substance on yourself than in the cat's mouth and a pissy cat.

The other two are eye drops. Now this cat takes eye drops fairly well... in what turns out to be a moment of enlightened hindsight, we've had some eye problems with him in the past... nothing like this of course, but we have had to put drops in his eye in other days. So the one set of eye-drops is administered three times a day, and it's to help fight the infection. The other stuff is to make his pupil dilate to ease the strain on the muscles of the iris and relieve pain. Which sounds straightforward enough. However, they did warn me at the vet... when you give him the second eye-drop medication, it will make him drool, so just be aware of that and don't freak out.

Drool. Okay... drool I can deal with. A little excessive saliva, no problem. However, drool doesn't quite describe what happens to this cat. About five minutes after giving him the eye drops, he starts FOAMING at the mouth. I mean big, thick, sticky globs of foamy saliva, and a cat that obviously is distressed and upset. AND... this is accompanied by vomiting as well.

I have to do this to him every four hours.

So now my cat hates me. Because of the way these medicines are staggered out, about every two hours I have to grab this cat and do something awful to him. He sees me coming now and hides. Two days ago this cat would refuse to be anywhere but on my lap, and now he runs away when he sees me coming. I can't say I blame him... if somebody did this stuff to me I'd be a little reluctant to hang out with that person myself. The worst part is, watching him go through the whole slobber/vomit process is probably more emotionally wracking to me than it is to the cat. Last night I had to smoke three cigarettes and drink a shot of Captain Morgan before I could bring myself to put the cat through the trauma one last time for the night... and then follow him around for half and hour cleaning up drool and half-digested Science Diet.

I'm not ashamed to admit it... I cried for about twenty minutes with the frustration of this medical torture I have to inflict on our poor cat. And now I plan on going out of town for a week to visit Wifey up in Michigan, and I cant take the cat with me. Again, I can't put the burden of medicating the cat on my friends, so the only option is once again to have the poor guy boarded. He'll be cared for, but the stress levels for that cat have to be almost off the chart... and anyone who owns cats knows that stress is directly linked to health issues. It's almost as if every action I take to get this cat back into decent health is being stale mated by trying to maintain my personal life. And of course, all of these visits to the vet, medications and need for having him boarded have come with a financial wallop as well.

And this is a CAT... it's not a child, not my son. It probably doesn't correlate well, but it gives me a sense of how difficult it must be to care for a chronically sick child, how mentally and emotionally taxing it is to put your loved ones through procedures you know will have nasty side-effects... when the medicine makes you sicker than the disease. I don't know if the fact that you can at least tell your child that you love him and that this terrible process is all to make things better makes it any easier or not... I know that all of my gentle cooing "don't worry kitty... I hate doing this to you but I have to so your eye will get better" doesn't mean squat to the cat. Obviously I can't just ignore the problem, and it's not a serious enough condition to consider euthanasia. (Although I did suggest simply digging the eye out with a spoon and giving the cat a patch... an idea I thought was good for a chuckle. The vet did NOT find it humorous.)

And... this will be an ongoing situation. Maybe the eye will get better in a couple of weeks, but the syndrome will still exist, and it will continue to impact Questor's health for the rest of his life, most likely shortening his time with us. Now I wonder how many future trips to the vet there will be, how many medications will be required just to keep him in fair health, how many traumatic nights will be spent waking up at two and six in the morning just to chase down the kitty and make him sick in the hopes of keeping him healthy. I've heard that Jordan is a hard road to travel... and Lord if it ain't true.