Wednesday 4 February 2009

Another Day, Another Diagnosis

It's Day Three of Goway's Awfully Expensive Big Adventure.

Double Pneumonia
Fluid everywhere*
Very Poorly Cat**
Not Expected to Survive the Night
and in the words of my nursey friend TFBUNDY***

Every morning he's been doing better than the night before and we've been expecting to take him home later. Every afternoon he's plateaud and they've wanted to keep him. This morning he was eating, drinking, and even playing. Everyone very happy, and we made plans to pick him up this evening.

And then this afternoon the vet rang again. They now think, due to his age, that the most likely cause for all this is asthma. Asthma? In a cat? Anyone met an asthmatic cat? I sincerely hope O2 isn't the standard treatment.

I am pretty good at giving a cat a pill. But I am struggling with the concept of pinning a cat down to give brown and blue inhalers. Can you nebulise a cat? It's a mildly entertaining thought, except that this is my little stresspot cat; I'm sure wrestling him to the ground on a regular basis to force him to inhale things from a hissy canister isn't going to ease his stress. And I'm pretty sure too that stress brings on asthma... I'm not sure how this works.

They're starting him on steroid injections. Now that will be interesting. Let's take a stressy cat and beef him up. Give him some bulk, and give him some aggression. Then let's try pinning him down for an inhaler. I'm thinking I may lose this battle.

Of course he might just stay on the injections. In which case I'll have to learn how to do them, which will cause much hilarity to those of you who know my feelings on any needle not attached to a piece of thread...

I'll know more in the morning
Tia
*technical term
**sympathetic vet term
***if you don't know, you don't want to know.

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