Second Blog Post....

Post #2.  What a difference a day makes.  Sometimes a good one, sometimes a bad one, sometimes it's difficult to decipher which.  Had to cancel our weekend trip to Virginia to attend good friends' daughter's wedding.  Why, you may ask?  

Let's just say I'm typing this entry on my laptop in my BATHROOM looking at one of five cats wearing the cone of shame (plastic Elizabethan collar) on his dear little head.  It's a long story, one that began last night about midnight as I realized to my horror that I had left my Vitamin D-3 soft gels on the kitchen counter in a quest to find an adequate container for them that the TSA at the airport would approve of when we arrived this morning.  Three out of five cats were discovered ON said kitchen counter licking their chops.  Five Vitamin D capsules were missing.  After a phone call to the animal emergency center, a phone call to the Animal Poison Control hotline (Thank you ASPCA, please every animal lover out there send them a donation for Christmas), and a harrowing 47 minutes googling the effects of D-3 toxicity in cats, I finally caught a few winks in the wee hours of the morning.  Upon awakening, I informed my husband of the situation, and we tearfully decided to nix the trip (of course by this time the bus was 10 minutes from the end of our driveway...yes I said driveway; we live on an island) and the ferry was likely to sail without us.  

Since then we have talked to numerous hotels in the Newport News, VA area, Frontier Airlines, our vet and my sister.  That last one will become clear in a minute...  Our wonderful vet (he makes house calls) just left.  The Vitamin D seems to be a bit of a red herring at this point; but let me just say that I believe things happen for a reason....an oftentimes inexplicable, even incomprehensible one, but a reason nonetheless.  I DO NOT want to live in a world where this is not true; a world of total randomness and chaos.  I grew up in one, but we'll get to that.  And more on my world view later.  So we think the toxicity of the Vitamin D has not been reached (after mathematical calculations on the part of the Poison Control Center, myself, and our vet....HOWEVER, one of the five cats, Pumpkin, has beginning stage renal (kidney) disease, for which he takes a compounded medication (actually calcitriol, which IRONICALLY, is a form of Vitamin D) and subcutaneous fluids which we administer every 10 days.  I often feel the need, incidentally, to divulge to visitors that we are not some kind of frightening drug addicts just because we have an IV bag hanging from a coat hanger in our downstairs bathroom.  He has done great in the two years we have had him on this regimen.  But because too much D can compromise the kidney function, and we can't absolutely rule out that he could have gotten into some of the vitamins on the counter, we need to err on the side of caution with him.  So, as I said earlier, the vet was here to draw blood to check kidney levels.  

While this procedure was being carried out; however, Pumpkin was seen to have another problem.  An abscessed anal gland (for you pet owners out there, you know what this is, for others, let's just say it's a literal "pain in the butt" for him and us) which needed to be drained.  Thus the cone on his head, otherwise referred to as "the cone of shame."  Our two geriatric dogs wore those off an on for years when we lived in Los Angeles and they developed allergies to something in the smog, so we HAVE  done this before.  Don't try it at home though, unless your vet absolutely insists.  I feel somewhat relieved now at our having made the decision to stay home.  Antibiotics will be involved, and warm compresses twice a day.  I won't say more.  Oh, and the bit about my sister....her cat had this unfortunate condition earlier this year and we cat people have to stick together for moral support and practical tips on feline caregiving.  Meanwhile I see my usually dignified cat trying to maneuver around the bathroom without the benefit of any peripheral vision.  Eating should be interesting for him when we attempt that later...