Priscilla's Workshop

 I have written about my cats before but today's cat experience was a step beyond. Two of my three cats are very old, with one being 19 or thereabouts and the other 17 or somewhere close to that. The lack of specificity is that both of them were rescues of a sort. The older of the two, mostly Siamese but not pure, was taken in by a nurse when he was just a kitten. The nurse's sister had sort of bullied her to take the cat so even though she was allergic and wasn't supposed to have pets in her apartment, she adopted him for a while. She took reasonable care of him, getting him to the vet and having him neutered and such, but the whole "no pets" prohibition meant that he lived in her closet when she left the apartment. When she found out that the house that we had moved into was literally crawling with mice (I swear there were so many they earned their own zip code), she convinced me that he would help take care of the vermin, so I somewhat reluctantly took him in and we have enjoyed his company ever since. He was a pretty good mouser and soon we had no issues at all.

Well as life happens, my elderly cat has developed some health issues, the most dangerous being deteriorating kidneys and some thyroid problems. His kidneys have only recently advanced to an even more dangerous level so he had to begin hydrotherapy, consisting of having a subcutaneous drip of  ringer's lactate once a week. Poor Tom is supposed to undergo this treatment every week until he dies but we live a fair distance away from the veterinary office so they offered to teach me how to administer the infusion. As a quilter I have poked myself with a needle more often than I care to say but I had never attempted to stick a hypodermic needle in anyone for any reason. Luckily Tom is just a sweetheart, never a scratcher or biter or even much of a complainer, and my first try was just right. Now I just have to do this every Monday for the duration. If this had been my youngest cat who will turn 12 this fall, I probably would have told the vet to take care of the cat herself since I have no doubt that someone, feline or human, would be losing some blood poking Max with a hypodermic.

But speaking of Max--he is a Maine Coon Cat and he is quite large. Unfortunately when he was weighed six months ago he was overweight and the vet warned me that if this kept up he would probably develop Type II diabetes. Naturally I didn't want that to happen but the vet seemed very casual about getting him to lose weight. All she said was just to feed him less and more on the wet food side than the dry. Given how persistent and insistent cats are about wanting to eat, that didn't seem like much of a plan to me unless I simply locked him in the basement. So I went online to find out what cat food had the least calories. Turns out that Max already liked to eat the one that led that list--Friskie's Senior Stew. I had not given Max this food as the whole meal in the past, but I began to do so after his weigh-in, sometimes even adding a little water to the stew to cut the calories even more. He would get just a tiny bit of kibble to round out his meal and he certainly seemed to be thriving.

So when we went back to the vet last Friday, Max had lost 2.5 pounds but the vet didn't believe it. It is notoriously difficult to get cats to diet so she thought he might have some dread affliction which a blood test would reveal. The good news is that he really did lose all that weight, going from 21+ pounds to just a hair over 19, right about where he should be. Of course Max likes the new food so much he isn't going to want to switch back. The vet was quite impressed and told me to keep up the good work.