We needed to take the cats in this afternoon for their vaccinations and checkups and such. Juliette has been quite sick and I rattled off a bunch of demands to the doc in my best Doug Ross low, fast, reassuring patter, before I left the room to take care of some work.
"She isn't breathing well, she's listless, has a discharge from her eyes and snores like a coal miner. We slowed way down on the amount of food we feed her and she's only lost .2 pounds in 2 years. I am concerned she is retaining fluid, so please take a pee test and listen closely to her heart and lungs. Excuse me, I have to go out here for a moment."
Well, my cat, (likely both cats), have Herpes. In my follow up reading it's quite a common problem and quite an oft-administered diagnosis. The manifestations of the disease are identical to Juliette's symptoms and so we were given a tube of stuff to feed her twice a day, every day until it's gone.
It's a big-ass tube, and fellow cat owners out there know that most cats don't pine too well to being force fed something from a tube. I have no idea how long it will take to get through the tube in calendar months, but I would say whatever length of time it is will be tantamount to 1,000 eternities in Hell.
The directions benignly tell us to put a little dab on kitty's nose to stimulate the taste desire and kitty will then, as if being fed some sort of beluga caviar and black truffle aphrodisiac, lap the stuff up willingly and cry, neigh, wail for more.
I think not. Not my cat anyway who is as famously fickle as she is fantastically fatuous. A female. Siamese. Cat. The female Siamese cat who, without any discouragement from her "owners", runs the place-The whole place and every aspect of the place.
Needless to say, Juliette did not leap rapturously at the goo we wiped on her runny nose. She almost figured out a way to eat around it when we stirred it into the soft food we gave her. But, she did eat it in the soft food.
I won't put it past her that she knew this was her ticket to soft food heaven. For those of you who doubt a cat can be smart and manipulative, I recommend you own one for a day. Soft food is but a treat in this house, because our cats drink plenty of water, (most of it right from my glass when I look away but for a moment), and because soft food makes for soft, fat, namby pamby cats.
And I'm cheap.
So until this industrial vat sized tube of L-Lysine, (yep-a common synthetic amino acid), is gone, each day, twice a day is either going to be a struggle, or will be silently lapped up in so much soft, expensive, highly caloric food. Our choice then, put another way, is to struggle or capitulate.
Hi, my name is Neville Chamberlain...
So much for the .2 drop. We'll get her immune system up where it needs to be and get her feeling better, but she will be indistinguishable from a hedgehog by that point, all round and fatty. Then we'll have to wean her off the soft stuff and put her back on her senior cat, sensitive stomach, hairball control, caffeine free, neurotic food, (seriously, this stuff has so many bullet point descriptors on the bag you can't even see the picture of the desperate looking single woman in her 40s trying so hard to please her cat), she had been eating for years and liking just fine, thank you very much.
Like I said, I don't know how long this medicine is going to last in actual calendar time, but one thing's for sure... it's gonna be a long tube.
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