Flippy - I Rant, You Read
Saturday, May 10, 2008
the wee hours
While Leigh-Ann is Away, One or More Cats Must Need Veterinary Care - That is an established rule
Leigh-Ann left to visit her family in Canada on Tuesday night. I proceeded to collapse from severe fatigue for about 48 hours, only getting up to feed and clean up after the pets. Carlo had chewed up a ring from a milk jug, a toy that he and Bunny looooove. Unfortunately, Carlo can’t seem to stop himself from chewing on them and we thought he swallowed a small piece because he had a bit of diarrhea before Leigh-Ann left. Naturally, when I’m home alone with him, you just know he’s not going to get better. That violates “the rule”. On Thursday afternoon, I took Carlo to the vet so he could get some bland food and to make sure he didn’t sneak anything else. He’s been known to scavenge in the bird room and the parrots, while normally just totally messy eaters, also seem to occasionally think it’s fun to throw pellets down to the cats. The cats love it. However, Carlo has had terrible IBD since he was tiny. He had constant diarrhea and horrible body rippling stomach cramps until we finally tried a raw diet of Wild Kitty cat food. Just like that, his diarrhea cleared up and he started to thrive again. We thought we were going to lose him because he didn’t seem to be able to keep in any nutrition. Okay, so we’ve established that Carlo has sensitive bowels, right? Dropping him off at the vet, while making me feel like the world’s worst mom (he was shaking, he was so scared), I knew that he would get better and all would be well in the Wee Paws animal kingdom finally. Right? RIGHT?!
WRONG! After Carlo was gone, I noticed that someone else had diarrhea. Not all that easy to diagnose when it could be any one of a number of cats. But, right away, I saw TJ poop a little puddle. Okay, so TJ wasn’t feeling well. Hmmm, that’s weird, because Carlo’s diarrhea was caused by eating a piece of plastic, which clearly isn’t contagious. Ha! He fooled us all. Okay, we really don’t know for sure what’s going on with Carlo because they gave him some meds to stop the diarrhea and he’s not really eating because he’s scared, so they haven’t been able to get a stool sample. Now, back to TJ. I was walking down the upstairs hallway, going past the litter box in the guest bathroom when I saw Derek in the box, having explosive diarrhea. Oh man… That’s two more and neither of them eat plastic (TJ has a thing for string - he spent the night at the vet last year after eating a three foot long piece of string), so it’s probably stress because their main mom is gone. Leigh-Ann takes on the majority of work when it comes to the cats. I take care of the two little dogs - feeding, pilling, cleaning up after, etc. She takes care of the two big dogs. She also does the feedings for the cats. I guess our deal was that if she wanted to rescue a bunch of cats, she was going to be responsible for their care. I’m responsible for their playtime. I’m like the weekend father who takes the kids to amusement parks and buys them video games. I like to see them play with new toys (or, I take the orange plastic rings off the Gatorade bottles for them, which makes them just as happy as if they got an expensive toy...oh, and the Gatorade rings are safer for Carlo because they’re thicker and the inside has jagged edges that aren’t fun to chew) or cuddle in new beds. Hmm, where was I? Oh, maybe it’s stress and the cats will get better in a few hours, right? RIGHT?
WRONG! I took a sample of the diarrhea to the vet’s office when I went to go visit Carlo. The poor little guy is still so scared. He wouldn’t even eat with me there. He only wanted to squirm behind my back (they have a room with a couch) and cuddle/hide. At least he wasn’t shaking. If we were at home, we would’ve had a lovely nap - Carlo is an excellent cuddler. I couldn’t stay there for too long because I needed to go to the grocery store for pumpkin (it’s supposed to help firm up their poop and that would be great!) and then get home to feed everyone. Carlo was so nervous that he was shedding like nobody’s business and it felt like I had half of his coat on me. So, I was rooting around in the car for the roller to get the hair off me. One of the techs saw that I was still there and came outside to give me the news. The cats have some bacteria crud (it’s been a blur, I’ll fill in the technical details later on today - they have Clostridium perfringens) and it’s very very contagious. The vet said that I needed to empty out all of the litter boxes, wash them with bleach, and fill them up with new litter. That’s all fine & dandy in most households, not a big deal. Well, not too big a deal. However, we have 7 litter boxes, and only one of them is actually a litter box and is kind of small. The others are big plastic containers you find at Target, so you can store your crap...but not your literal crap, like we use them. They’re very large and they use up a lot of litter. We have coupons for a certain kind of litter that we like, so buying the litter wasn’t the problem. Remember that little back surgery issue I had? Well, I try to avoid carrying 40lb bags of cat litter around the house. I think my back surgeon would approve of that. However, I’m home alone and there’s no one to help. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive Matt & Amy for moving away, especially when I need Matt to be the man around the house. I miss them for other reasons, but I admit, I liked having a strong young man living next door.
I tried to save myself a bit of work by buying a new litter box for the epicenter of the infection. We needed one with higher sides anyway. I bought two others because I figured I deserved a break. Plus, I thought that replacing the three most infected boxes would be a good start to cleaning up. I’m so tired though and I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to move for the next few days, but I still have more boxes to clean. I hope I’m not dooming myself to a steady stream of cats getting diarrhea because I didn’t immediately zoom around the house and clean up all the boxes. I have the worst three done (I scrubbed one of them, so I still have a new one to replace one of the others, yay!), so I’m hoping that’s most important. Oh wait, and there’s even more to this whole episode. They wanted to know all of the cats’ weights because I’m going to have to give them liquid meds twice a day. So, I weighed myself (I think I’ve lost five pounds since Leigh-Ann left) and then I went around picking up cats and standing on the scale. They looked at me like I was nuts. Some did worse than look, they squirmed and clawed to get away. I didn’t even attempt to pick up Chelsea (she’s not fond of that sort of behavior) or Dobby. There’s no way I’ll be able to catch Dobby twice a day to give her meds. Most days she won’t even let me pet her, much less scoop her up for unpleasantries. I haven’t witnessed any diarrhea from her and I’m hoping it stays that way. I have been able to get them all to eat some pumpkin mixed into their food and they don’t seem to mind it. Hopefully that will help things until I get the meds tomorrow.
I’m grateful that even though this really really REALLY sucks, we have an awesome vet’s office and I have at least two volunteers who said that they would come over to help me medicate the cats. I’ll try it for a day on my own. I’m not sure it’ll be any easier to catch the cats to hand them off to someone else to medicate than to just try doing it myself. I can pretty guarantee that there won’t be 100% compliance amongst the beasts, but maybe if I can keep up with the sick ones, the others won’t need as much medicine.
And what do you have planned for YOUR weekend? 
I’d better go finish up the other litter boxes. Also, I taped the Penguins/Rangers game, so I’ll take a peek at that before the score is unavoidable.
By the way, I apologize for how my story bounces around in a babbling sort of way. I’ve had an extremely long 48 hours and I’m not thinking overly clearly.
