Autumn

Yesterday I closed windows before the sun went down, so I guess it’s time to buy some firewood. In my next life I’m opting for central heat, but here we are, fairly stuck in this one. (In a manner of speaking, that is.)

Not much action on the blog lately, eh? That’s as it should be. Yesterday, for example, the goddamn cat was dying. Well, not really. But vomiting every five minutes through most of the night before is hardly normal. The vet immediately went for kidney failure and ordered up “full senior blood work” plus a urine sample on the beast. After disappearing with the cat for 20 minutes, she came back to say that Callie wasn’t “co-operating,” which I took to mean the vet got bitten, and she advised us to go back home and wait until the cat calmed down enough to have the needle stuck in her again.

The upshot of all this was that we sat around for hours figuring the cat was a goner. I’d already researched feline renal failure, so we mostly cried and tried to steel our nerves for putting her down. (Don’t get me started on doing this with pets.) But then the phone rang: it was the vet reporting that the cat’s kidneys were okay—not perfect, but good enough to cross that worry off the list. The next choice in the disease raffle was an unnamed intestinal infection, so poor the vet had given Callie a whole laundry list of injections of everything from antibiotics to steroids. It’s amazing how much better spending $252 makes a cat feel. Today, however, she’s listless as hell, sleeping all day in the middle of the living room floor, and hasn’t eaten anything in 36 hours.

UPDATE, 24 hours later. The cat ate a few pieces of kibble overnight! Either that, or the packrats are back.

In any event, we no longer anticipate buying the “appetite stimulant” the vet wanted to sell us: “You’d need to go to Walmart and buy gloves, then you take this medicated gel and spread it around on the inside of her ears…”