Pete and I hurtled round to Pets At Home last night (new branch just opened at Anlaby Park, nice and handy for us), and purchased four collars, and identity barrels, for the remaining members of the Tribe, including the part time one. We didn’t buy one for Iggy, because we do truly believe he’s gone for good …
Anyway, they were bought individual carefully chosen collars:
Ron: as he is black, utterly black, with green eyes, we bought him a black velvet collar with luminous green eyes. You can only see the green eyes on this.
Mustrum has a black velvet collar with silver reflective fishies on it. And very splendid he looks too.
Henry has a grey webbing collar with lime green and teal dots on it, which claims to be reflective, and
Lilith has got a leopard print one (we had to, really, dont you think)? Of course, she still hasn’t come home, so I’m going to go up the road later today, knock on the madwoman’s door, and demand she hands my cat over.
Despite my misgivings, they all seemed to accept the collars fine, and to my amazement all three are still wearing them this morning. We shall see …
There was a knock on the door this morning, and the mad old bat* from down the road was stood there. “Do you own a white cat?” she asked. Well, we did buy a cream cat, but I don’t like to say we actually own any of our cats. But that seemed a bit semantic, so I just said “Yes”, and worried that she was going to tell me that Lil was injured, or worse. Coming on top of Iggy’s disappearance (yes, he is still gone) that would be very hard to take.
Anyhoo, she has been feeding Lilith because she “thought she was a stray”. Right. Looking it up today, it is just 10 days past two years since I had this conversation with her (see here). She’s only been going walkabout again for a few weeks, so I guess this woman forgot (to give her the benefit of the doubt). She seemed quite confused, firstly saying that Lil came in through her catflap, and then that she “let her out to have a wee”. I have asked her yet again not to feed her, and I’m going out this evening to purchase a collar. I don’t like them, and I’m not sure Lily will actually wear it, but perhaps it will remind this seemingly senile woman (no, not me) that the cream cat is not a stray, and in fact lives somewhere else. With us.
*well, she might not be , but she damn well seems like it.
We haven’t seen Iggy since Friday. More worryingly, we haven’t heard him, which is very unusual; he’s a vocal cat, and calls a lot when he’s out and about. I went over and spoke to Kath and Frank this morning, and they haven’t seen him either, and Frank has been out looking for him.
Also, to add fuel to our fears, the other cats have been slightly out of sorts. I’m convinced that cats sense far more than we give them credit for, and so … do they know what’s going on? Do they just miss him?
In any event, I’m close to giving up hope. He’s old, ill and in pain, and perhaps he just gave up and took himself off somewhere. But the not knowing is very hard.
As I mentioned, Iggy is spending a lot of time away from home, and yesterday my suspicion is confirmed. The elderly couple over the road are feeding him. I went over yesterday while Kath was in her front yard, and asked them not to do it any more, explained that he was quite ill and we needed him to come home for his medication, and that we’d spent £90 at the vet last week, which was a bit of a waste if we couldn’t actually get him home for pills.
“Oh” she said. “We thought you didn’t want him any more.” Which is just a bloody *nonsense*, isn’t it? They knew where we live, they knew where Iggy lived, and they must have heard us call and call him, and even pick him up from their front step. I do wish people wouldn’t feed other folks’ cats … Anyway, they say they won’t any more, but I’m not sure I actually believe them.
On the same subject, we’re not seeing much of Lilith at the moment either. Now, we know she has a penchant for, shall we say, sharing her favours – see this entry – so we weren’t too worried, although we do miss the vile baggage when she’s not around. The other night I woke up about 3.a.m, to see her sitting on Pete’s chest of drawers. I actually woke him to see her, as I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a dream, and he clearly remembered the next day.
Lo and behold, last night she burst through the cat flap, completely wired. Wouldn’t let us even touch here, looking completely feral. We gave her a pouch of wet food (a rare treat in this house, as they are fed on bikkit, mostly), and she positively ravened it down. She’s gone again now, but at least we know she’s OK, and she’ll be home when the weather turns. But I might do a bit of leafleting and ask people not to feed her, please.
A chap really doesn’t want to be at home at the moment, and we don’t see him much. Whenever I can, I grab him and he gets fed a pill wrapped in chickie! (and the others all get chickie! too, obviously), but he’s nowhere near his full dose of kidney medication.
Our feeling was that the arthritis is getting worse – he seems to be spreading his back toes, perhaps to better take the weight, and I think he’s roaming his turf for his last summer; I know that sounds mawkish, but …
Anyway, out of kidney pills and horse medication, I managed to catch him yesterday and put him in the cat box, then phoned the vet for an appointment. Fortunately they had one in 15 minutes time, and so we bundled him into the car and took him over to Sarah. She confirmed what we thought; he’s getting worse. Which is inevitable, of course – he can’t get *better* from what he has. She agrees with us; we shall endeavour to keep him comfortable as long as we can, but that’s it.
So if a chap wants to roam the Dukeries, who am I to stop him? I’d rather have him home safe, but his desires come first.
Cost: £91.95 yesterday. I daren’t add it up 🙂
Now, here’s someone who knows about that! I’d show her photo, but she has disabled linking, but do go and read the piece.
Beautiful. And makes me roar with laughter every time 🙂
A few people have (very kindly) enquired as to how Igpuss is doing on his new regime and, to tell the truth, we don’t know.
He was doing absolutely great on the two injections a week for his arthritis, and then as soon as we dropped him to one a week, as directed, it all seemed to go bad again. Also, it didn’t help that he decided that he’d really not have the jabs after all, thankyouverymuch, which means he has to be stalked and stabbed while he’s asleep.
We’ve settled on one every five days for now, which seems to be helping him, and see if we can stretch it out over time.
In other news, Henry has a cold, and is spluttering and sneezing all over the place, but he’s still eating, so I don’t worry too much.
We took Iggy back to Chants Vets Monday before last – 6 Feb, for them to look at his mouth. Sarah was very pleased with his progress, and said to bring him back in ten days so we could look at the options for treating his osteoarthritis. Pete and I do both feel that this is getting worse quite quickly 🙁
The standard treatment feline arthritis is Metacam, but it is a steroid, and thus not great for cats with impaired kidney function – yes, he has this too. She asked us, carefully, if we would prefer him to live a longer life, or a shorter and happier one without pain. It seems extraordinary to me that anyone would give the former answer, and of course we didn’t. But we are first going to try something called Adequan, which is some sort of magic potion which miraculously grows cartilage back (no, I don’t really understand it either). It was developed for horses, and is not actually licensed for use on small animals in the UK, so we had to sign a release form. The downsides are a) it’s £60 for a 5ml phial (!), but he will be on one 0.2ml dose per week in a couple of months (two a week for four weeks, then one a week for four weeks, then one a month), and that – oh dear lord – it has to be injected. We can hardly wait, especially as he was extremely displeased to be given his first dose (by the vet) today. Kevlar gloves may be required.
We’re also starting him on Benzacare today, which is used for the treatment of chronic renal insufficiency in cats. These pills claim to be palatable. We shall see. Half a 5mg tablet daily; perhaps we should keep an ambulance and a blood bike on standby … The vet gave us 3.5 pills, i.e. a week’s worth, and charged £6.81. She is perfectly happy to give us a prescription, so I have sourced them online, at £17.99 for 28, which seems rather better to me. It seems impossible to buy the Adequan except in packs of 5, at about £250 or more, so I don’t think we’ll bother.
We should know within the month if Adequan helps his arthritis, and if it doesn’t, we’ll have to put him on Metacam, with the risk that carries. Ho hum.
Cost today: £87,50. And I have to buy a load of syringes and needles, and we now have a sharps disposal bin in the house!
Iggy has been suffering from pain in his hips/back legs for a little while; it seemed to come and go, but on Friday we determined we would take him to the vet this week, and so fetched one of the cat baskets out of the loft while we were getting some other stuff down.
We were away for a couple of days, and when we got back, he seemed quite miserable, and wanted a lot of company, so I phoned for an appointment this morning. As he sat on the stool in the kitchen, I said to Pete that his mouth looked a bit … crumpled, and we wondered if he’d had a mini stroke or something.
Anyway, off we trundled to Chants Vets, and explained why we’d brought him. Sarah said he would need an X-ray under anaesthetic, but obviously wanted to have a general look at him. She went to open his mouth, and he really didn’t want her to. I held him while she managed to take a look and, to our horror, his mouth was in a dreadful state; he had a hard lump in there, and there was no question but it would have to be properly investigated. She said it might be an abscess, but it might also be a tumour, and if it were the latter, it would almost certainly be kinder to not let him come round from the operation.
We came home about 10.30, and just waited. They phoned about 1, and said they’d done a blood test which showed his kidney function was a bit poor, but that really they had to go ahead with the operation, he couldn’t be left as he was. I phoned at 2, and was told he was still in the theatre, and phoned again at 3.30 as instructed, to find he was out, and could be collected at 6.
Along we trundled, to find that all four canines had broken (one of which was causing the abscess), and had to be removed, two other molars ditto, and several small incisors. We have an opiate-based painkiller for him, and he has to go back in a week to see what to do about the kidney function, and the arthritis – our options on the latter are a little limited due to the former, but there are several options. We were warned that he probably would have little appetite today, and to try and tempt him.
Cost today: £525 (ouch), and we will be paying for various treatments for him for the rest of his life. And the chap is worth every penny. He’s now sitting in front of the stove, which we lit before we went out so that it wold be properly warm for him, and it’s exceedingly nice to have him home, given that we thought he might not come back at all … Oh, and his first action on coming out of the cat basket was to wander into the kitchen for some ham, and then to the bikkit bowl 🙂
