First, before talking about my trip to the pet hospital, I want to say that I want a new template for this blog. I have been searching the internet for the "right" one, and I have yet to find it. If anyone has any fun links to little template-stores, where I can find the "perfect" Zuska background and sent up, please do share.

Yesterday, my boy was acting funny. he kept going into his litter box. and then he was attacking his tail. beloved thought perhaps the boy had worms (which honestly, beloved *always* thinks, and i really never agree), and so we gave him a pill. at one point, he was so crazily attacking his tail that he got his own claw stuck in the tail. deep. he was stuck all curled up in a ball, and was yelling at himself. it was odd. not typical Boots behavior (Boots is his middle name, Chessie Boots Johasafeather Berkeley __________ [true last name of my daughters and their father and no longer their mother]. That is his full name. So perhaps Boots is not his MIDDLE name, that would be Jahosafeather (i'm really not sure how that is spelled, so i'm not going to even try for consistency within this post).

But today, he was worse. he was so obviously agitated. jumping up to the window sill, then jumping down as if something was AFTER him, and then running to the ltiter box, doing nothing, and running over to his food. We thought yesterday, and continued to think today, that he was constipated. In the spring/summer/fall when he is allowed out of doors, we see that he sometimes eats grass, and we think he's going for some roughage by doing so. in the winter, he stays in (b/c snow freaks him out), and he has no access to roughage.

but when we looked up kitty-constipation, we found that there's a VERY SERIOUS condition that plagues male cats which is often mistook for the much less serious constipation problem. It's a urinary blockage, and could make him die.

So I took him to the hospital. His bladder was small and empty, and there were no poops in his intestines. I was not too surprised, b/c he did let me poke and prod at his belly - but he would let me cut open his belly and examine his organs with a toothpick if I wanted to - he's that compliant with me. so i couldn't take his lack of scratching, biting or otherwise complaining as a diagnosis.

Instead, I paid $140.04 to the vet for an exam and an anti-inflammatory (in case his bladder is swollen, and causing him the irritation), and $20 for the cab ride there and back.

but my boy is okay. and that's what is important. b/c i love him, and if he was not okay, i would be super-sad. He is curled up next to me right now. i think he knows that despite the fact that it involved being shoved into a cat carrier and forced to ride in one of those scary (the first cab driver was *especially* scary) car things, and then have a strange woman poke him and prod him with the noises of barking dogs coming from the surrounding rooms, just to then be shuffled off to a lab room where urine was extracted directly from his bladder ---- he knew it was all an expression of my love for him, and that I, in the end, took care of him.

posted by Zuska @ 11:29 PM

2 Comments:

At Monday, January 16, 2006 1:46:00 AM, The Marpepps! said…

That's so scary! I'm terribly sorry Boots has been acting that way--and I'm sorry you spent $160 on an Advil. Better safe than sorry though.
At Monday, January 16, 2006 12:01:00 PM, E. McPan said…

Awww. Poor kitty. At least he's gonna feel better soon!