#also took 2 of my gabapentin to try to be less angry

[airyairyaucontraire]

Okay so my cat's 15 and she's getting arthritis in her back legs. My mother and sister took her to the vet about it yesterday because I had to work and my mother's retired and my sister's part-time. I greatly appreciate their help.

She had to be drugged before going because when I took her in for her check-up and vaccination last weekend she brought shame on our family with her behaviour and bit me on the hand inflicting a puncture wound which I can still see today, thanks Pearl, love you too. I know you were scared and your legs hurt so I'm not angry with you but it was both painful and embarrassing.

Anyway she was fine when she was doped up (my mother and sister texted me pictures from the appointment so I could see she was okay, also appreciated). The vet wants me to give her pain relief medicine for the arthritis and I'm absolutely down with that, I want my cat to be comfortable.

HOWEVER

the medicine is Gabapentin which comes in 100mg capsules of a very, very fine white powder.

the instructions on the prescription are to give her "half a capsule twice daily."

do you see the difficulty

I do not have a scale that can measure fucking milligrams

Trying to cut the dose out on a hard surface like cocaine means losing a lot of it because a) it's a very, very fine powder and b) I have shaky hands because of this fucking neurological condition the fucking neurologist couldn't identify.

And if I say fuck it and give her a whole capsule once daily, well, that's what I was required to give her before the appointment to render her dopey and tractable, which made it hard for her to walk, and also it would wear off so she'd only have 12 hours' relief while being too dopey to enjoy it and the rest of the time she'd be sore

so what I have to do, after a very frustrating phone call with the vet nurse during which I assured him I knew it was not his fault and hoped I didn't sound angry with him but I was finding this very stressful and was concerned that I would not be able to dose my cat properly, and thought the instructions were incredibly impractical, is this

using a syringe measure 2 millilitres of water and put it in a shot glass

with great care twist the halves of one capsule apart and pour the powder into the water

stir it with a toothpick until it appears more or less dissolved

draw up one millilitre with no real idea how much of the drug is suspended in it BUT HEY

squirt it down my startled and offended cat's throat

put Glad wrap over the top of the shot glass so it doesn't dry up and put it away to dose her again at night

There's another medication in gel form that I'm supposed to put on her wet food/meat but she doesn't like it and tried to eat around it, so I'm probably just going to squirt it down her throat too.

and do you want to know what is really fucking rich about all this

the medication the neurologist prescribed which has NOT fixed my tremors?

GABAPENTIN 100mg CAPSULES

FUCKING IDENTICAL TO THE ONES THE VET GAVE ME FOR THE CAT

yes I have cried with frustration about this today

my cat's getting old and sick and I can't help her, I'm getting old and sick and nobody can help me

#life with airy

[pictureamoebae]

Peggy made it through her surgery. They removed her toe and also a small cyst from her front shoulder that she’s had ever since I adopted her. Both will be sent to pathology now to test for any nasties. It’s likely the cyst will be fine, but the toe might yield scary things. We’ll have to wait and see.

When I went to pick her up the nurse took me back to the holding room. Usually they prep the patients and get them in their carriers ready to go home but Peggy has become more and more stressed during this whole ordeal and wouldn’t let them anywhere near her once she was awake again. She let me stroke her straight away, which the nurse marvelled at and made me glow with love, while also feeling awful because she was so stressed in the first place. After many yowls and cries and growls and sadnesses together we got a cone on her and I managed to coax her into the carrier.

Back home it became clear right away there was no way she’d tolerate the cone, which she neatly demonstrated by throwing up into it. So off it came. Which makes her a lot happier but my job over the coming days unbelievably more difficult as I have to stop her licking the wounds. Perhaps counterintuitively it’s the one on her shoulder, where the cyst was removed, she wants to lick the most. Both wound sites have internal dissolvable stitches and skin glue on the outside — something I asked for if possible after previous experience with my last cat who ripped out his stitches due to stress in the final days before he died.

The first few hours at home we’re gruelling and I barely held it together. I’d only had maybe 6 hours sleep over the past 2 days, so I was already coming close to just running for the hills... where I could have a nice little nap and forget about everything. The comedown from the ketamine used in the anaesthetic made her dysmorphic, which was partly why she was so angry. She couldn’t settle, despite being sleepy (solidarity, Peggy), but couldn’t walk well because, well I guess losing a toe does that. I tried to get a dose of vetergesic (opiate painkiller) into her but she was still too high and wouldn’t take most of it. We just had to sit and watch her and try to comfort her as best as possible.

I was pretty much dead on my feet by 8pm so I napped on the sofa on and off while my partner watched her. I got up at 11pm and by then she was a lot more lucid. I managed to get a gabapentin tablet (painkiller and anti-anxiety med often used for arthritis, 3 a day) into her by way of sneaky tuna water, and then I went up to bed until 2.30am. When I came back down she was so much happier. She’d been able to sleep quite a bit. So I gave her an Onsior tablet (anti-inflammatory, 1 a day), again in tuna water, and she devoured the lot and then ate some biscuits. That was nearly an hour ago and she’s napping now while my partner has gone to bed and I take the overnight shift.

It’s going to be a long few days, for all of us. Her pain will slowly subside and she’ll eventually get used to having one less toe. Having internal stitches and skin glue means she’ll hopefully find them less irritating and leave the wound sites alone a bit more, but we will need eagle eyes for at least a few days. My partner’s extremely grumpy when anything disrupts his sleep cycle, so I’ll have that to contend with too!

Peggy has to go back for a wound checkup with the nurse on Monday. I am *not* looking forward to getting her in her carrier ahead of that. But after that she should have a week with no vet visit.

It’s 3.28am and I have to find ways to amuse myself now sat by her side while I try to stay awake for the next few hours. Part of that was writing this. You have to sit through boring cat owner tracts for my amusement.

#peggy ruxpin #cw: injury #injury: cw #amputation: cw #cw: amputation #cw: surgery #surgery: cw #cw: medical #medical: cw

[artkaninchenbau]

My cat of little over 13 years will be put down tomorrow. A vet and a nurse will come to our home to put him to sleep peacefully, as we didn’t want to stress him out any more by taking him to the nearest clinic.

I just want to talk about my sweet little sunshine, so that’s what I’ll do. That’s all this post will be.

This whole shitshot began almost immiditiately in January. My cat (who I’m not going to name because he has a very generic cat name that easily reveals where I live, so I’ll just call him Sunshine here) started limping for what felt like no reason. I wanted to take him to a vet right away but my mother didn’t want to, first because she thought there’s nothing a vet could do to help aside from putting him down, then later because she thought Sunshine’s limp was getting better (honestly I couldn’t see it). 7 days after he began limping my mom was finally convinced he needed to see a vet and we booked an appointment to the nearest clinic (just 10 minutes away) where we went to have him checked on the next Monday

Somehow our indoors-only cat had broken a bone on his middle toe on his front left paw, the toe was swollen (we hadn’t noticed) and possibly infected. We started giving him some antibiotics (had a terrible time when I learned in the worst possible way that cats sometimes start foaming and drooling excessively when given liquid antibiotics, so that was changed to a pill) and painkillers while our vet had some samples taken from my cat’s toe to be analyzed

She was worried he might have feline lung-digit syndrome (where lung cancer starts metasizing in toes) so she wanted to see if they could find any cancerous cells in his toe. After a little over a week or so the results were back and they couldn’t find anything like that, but the antibiotics didn’t seem to be helping either, so our vet believed the toe would have to be amputated. That said she was still worried about that syndrome and wanted to have his lungs x-rayed just in case, so soon we took him to the clinic to get those x-rays. Two vets looked at the images and they couldn’t find anything, so we booked the amputation for a week later

Our vet was still worried though, so she sent the x-ray images to be analyzed by a third party over seas. We were all worried sick for four or so days until on Monday the 27th, just before the clinic would close around 8 pm, the vet called us to tell us the results.

There was a soft mass in one of my Sunshine’s lungs. A few centimeters wide. The vet said he’d have anywhere from a few weeks to a few months left. The amputation was canceled as she thought my baby wouldn’t survive it due to the tumor.

We continued giving him his antibiotics until we ran out, and he seemed to get better. He hardly limped anymore, a scab that had formed around the nail of his broken toe was getting smaller, he seemed to be okay.

But a little bit over a week after the antibiotics ran out he started getting worse again. Eating worse and worse, limping again, moving around so very little. So in mid-late February we took him to the clinic again to see if there was anything left we could do. The vet gave us some gabapentin for him, a painkiller that affects the nervous system (sometimes used to treat epilepsy/seizures).

The side-effects of that painkiller is ataxia (like, a loss of control when moving limbs) and sleepyness. For the first week it seemed like the painkiller was kind of helping, my cat was sleeping a lot but he also ate a little better. But then he didn’t eat as much anymore, and the ataxia started getting worse and worse. The worst part was that it was so hard to tell how much of it was caused by the painkiller and how much of it was just his condition getting worse and worse.

It’s so hard for him to move now that he doesn’t get up on his own to go poop or pee, for the past 5-6 days we’ve had to carry him to his litter box. He went from being a lil glutton, to picky eater, to only eating food straight from my hand, to only eating one cream-like cat treat. For the past week or two I’ve been feeding him liquids (water, cat milk, but mainly cat soup) with a tiny syringe (one we gave him his liquid antibiotic with) because I was worried he wasn’t eating enough and it was the only way I could pretty much force him to eat, but even then I can only feed him so much

His paw has swollen up so badly, it’s almost twice the size it should be. The infected toe had been bleeding out pus, the scab around the nail having grown massive, and now another toe on that paw has started bleeding a little too. And a toe on his left hindleg seems swollen as well

I hate myself for letting him get to a state this bad. There’s 16 and a half hours left before the vet comes to put him out of his misery- although the painkiller is pretty damn strong, he shouldn’t be in pain... But still

    I always wanted a cat when I was little, I was always asking for one but my parents always said no, until December 2006, when they finally caved in. A little bit after Christmas my mom found a kitten, mere weeks old, somewhat abandoned by its mother, looking for a home. When we went to check out the kitten at a farm nearby, we weren’t sure yet if we’d actually take the little thing with us. But seeing how the farmer didn’t really want it, how its mother seemed uninterested in it and how the farm with the many cows wasn’t a safe place for a helpless kitten... Well, we fell in love with him, at first sight. And we brought him home that same day.

We weren’t prepared at all, so my parents just dropped me and my brother off at home with the baby while they rushed into the city to buy supplies. We don’t know how old he was exactly when we got him, less than a month old for sure, but more than a few weeks. Small enough we had to bottle feed him, but eyes very much open and walking. He was our little baby. And he still is

He’s the most beautiful and soft cat in the whole world, and he means everything to me

When he was still a baby he pooped and/or peed under the Christmas tree. My dad had originally been against letting the little Sunshine sleep in their bed, but he warmed up immidiately and the cat has slept almost every single night in their bed ever since, the first time he specifically brought him to their bed and scared my mom who thought the kitten had escaped from the secluded area we were keeping him at the time. We thought him to raise his paw for treats

He rushed in and jumped straight into the toilet bowl once after I left the toilet (I had to chase him around desperately, trying to dry him- it had scared the shit out of me but my mom always loved telling this stoy about how one day when she came back from work she found me crying, trying to chase the cat around with a towl in hand because the cat had jumped into the toilet)

He loved, absolutely adored going outside in the summers, even when taking him out on a leash was a pain in the ass. He was so happy running around our yard, rolling in the grass. As he got older we stopped taking him outside (partially because it was my job but he’d always get really angry at me while we were outside, mainly because my dad was afraid he’d bring in ticks), but some 2-3 years ago we rebuilt our patio and turned it into a catio. He loved being there, he even learned the word “terrace”, so that everytime someone would say that word he would rush downstairs to the door, waiting to be let outside

His favorite toys were always hairties, a stick with a furry noodle thing sticking out at the other end, and a very long, very thick and slightly stretchy pink string

I was awful to him as an idiot kid, so he learned to hate me and distrust me, and I deserved that. And despite all that, he was the most patient cat in the world, letting me pet him as much as I liked while he was napping, letting me kiss his tiny forehead and rest my entire face against him. He wouldn’t purr to me, but he tolerated me so much, and I’m so grateful for that

After years of being given smooches, my cat started doing this thing were if someone gave him two kisses on the forehead/neck, he’d smack his lips twice in return. I think that was him trying to emulate the smooch sound, and it was so cute

I’ve heard people say that cats that’re separated from their mothers too early become weirdly like, licky? Like they’ll lick people’s hands etc a lot, and this was so true for him too. If you offered your hand to my Sunshine he’d give it a good ol’ bath, and it was the sweetest thing

I like keeping the doors to my room closed, so if my cat wanted to come in (which he didn’t want often), he’d either scratch at my door until I’d come open it, or like last summer, scratch at the door right behind me, and stare at me through the semi-jammed but slightly open door, until I’d open the other door for him. He’d often try to come to my room around 3-4 am, and he’d come almost daily to my room in the winter because I would open the window for him so he could get some fresh air even in a -25 C weather

My Sunshine didn’t like sleeping in my bed with me, he did it a few times when he was just a few years old until he stopped. Usually if he’d settle in my bed while I was still doing other things, he’d straight flee my room when I’d climb into my bed myself. In this January he started sleeping in my bed, sometimes climbing in while I was still there, or just not feeling when I’d come to bed myself. He didn’t do that every night, but he slept with me in that month more than he did in the past few years combined.

One “morning” (after his lung cancer diagnosis I think) he came into my room to sleep a little bit before noon, trying to escape the sounds of my dad vaccuuming downstairs. I had been struggling to fall asleep, but I managed after he settled in. I proceeded to see a few weird dreams, but the last one of them stood out;

In the last dream my cat had escaped outside, so me and my parents all rushed in to capture him and bring him back inside. It was summer, the weather was wonderful. We were running around in the yard, franticly searching for him, until I spotted him hiding amongst some wheat in the field next to us. He immidiately bolted out, running from that side of the yard to the other, towards the road, until he laid down under the birch trees next to the road. We were so worried he’d get run over by a car. We managed to get to him and grab him (not that he was fighting us), and we immidiately turned around to go back inside. I could hear a car approach us as I watched my mom hand my cat to me. He was so young and skinny, but looked somewhat upset as we were carrying him back inside.

And then I woke up, my cat sleeping quietly at the foot of my bed, against my legs. Call me nuts, but it felt like it was a message from my cat. How he had wanted to go already but we didn’t let him, and while he’s going to spend a little more time with us, sooner or later he will go, and we’ll never see him again.

Late last year my dad had appearently seen a dream where he was forced to eat cat paws. He feels like it may have been a prophetic dream.

A little over a month ago, I was so worried one night about my cat not eating properly I kind of started crying in my room while with my cat, asking him why he wasn’t eating. He came to inspect me almost immidiately, before leaving my room. I go check where he went and he was sitting at the stairs, staring at me. I went to dry my tears real quick and when I returned, he had gone downstairs. I found him waiting in front of his bowl, and when I gave him new wet food, he ate it. At that point, usually he wouldn’t eat anything if I didn’t offer it from my hand specifically.

I’m so grateful to my cat. For being such a sweetheart, for being so patient and kind and making us all so happy. I love him so much. And I’m so sorry I can’t do anything for him anymore except have him be put out of his misery

And while I know most indoors cats live to around 13-15 years old, meaning my 13 year old baby has reached the average age, I still feel like he’s too young to go and that its not fair. I’m going to miss him so much

Please don’t take my sunshine away

#Is this what they call 'blogging'? #CW Animal death #CW Euthanasia #CW Cat death