Wednesday, November 22, 2006

They like fruit ?

Poor Shadow. Viva and I noticed that kitty's face was looking a bit weird on Sunday - or weirder than usual anyway. On closer inspection we found that the right side was quite swollen, so we rushed her to the local vet right away.

Shadow does NOT like being in a box - and indeed will start to try and claw her way through the cardboard after not too long, or try to get out of one of the air holes - nose first. So getting her inside her kitty transport was a fun exerise.

The vet took a quick look and said she had an abcess on the inside of her lip. Ouchie. There were a number of pet emergicies that particular Sunday, so the vet couldn't do a 'drain and clean' that day - we had to bring her in the following morning. Which meant that we had to keep her inside overnight. Again - not a fun prospect for a cat used to the freedom offered by a cat door. A LONG night of kitty TRYING to get through her ( locked ) cat door, meeping in puzzlement / frustration and sitting in a sulk in the hallway - staring at the cat door and trying to summon all her psychic power to WILL the door open.
Also - she couldn't eat after 8pm. Another source of misery - Shadow likes to graze from her bowl every now and then. So the mysterious disappearence of her food bowls was insult to injury.

Next morning - had to stuff Shadow back in her box and take her to the vet. It's amazing how bad a animal, without the power of articulate speech, can make you feel about leaving them at the vet.

Her wee operation went fine and she was VERY happy to be back home have her freedom back again. It took a couple of hours for her to have trust in the cat door again.

Now we have a new challenge at kitty mealtimes - antibiotics. We have this liquid stuff we have to force feed her - talk about a performance ! You think we were trying to make her ingest broken glass or something. She was sneaky the first time too - she seemed like she was behaving and let me prise open her mouth without too much trouble - but as soon as Viva started to squirt the medicine with the eye-dropper, the little bitch deftly twisted her head out of my grasp, dodged the medicine and I ended up with it on my shirt !

We had to wrap her up in a towel this morning. That helped a lot.

The weird thing is that the antibiotics are banana flavoured.

Hmmm.

Yeah - I'm ALWAYS having to dig kitty out of the fruit bowl !

"Bad kitty ! Bad Shadow ! Bananas are HUMAN food ! For HUMANS ! No bananas for kitty ! Here - have this guava instead ..."

Who was the vet who thought that was a good idea ? I'd hate to find out what gorilla antibiotics taste like...

3 comments:

BubbaJay said...

We usually use the liquid form on our guys. With 4 cats someone usually needs antibiotics.

The pill form can be used, but there is a trick to getting the mouth open and the pill down with one hand that a vet showed us.

Anonymous said...

Now you have a *real* blog, because you wrote about your cat :)

Hopefully Shadow gets better soon. The more you practise with the antibiotics the easier it will get. Trust me, I had a cat that needed two pills a day for about ten years.

...and yeah. They should really flavour cat meds with mince or something. Delicious mouse flavour antibiotics?

Seraph said...

She's ALMOST getting used to it now - but she just does NOT want to open up and take the damn stuff ! I'm almost wanting a crowbar to prise her jaws open with !

But she's MUCH better !

Bubbajay - the idea of getting a pill into her fills me with cold dread. I would love to know the arcane vet secret way though !