Tag Archives: cat

A good report…

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Anya got a good report from her surgeon. They were able to break down all of the adhesions and resect “a lot” of conjunctive material that has been hooding her eye for months. They laid in dissolvable stitches in a few spots to, hopefully, keep everything retracted as it heals. 

There’s a chance, they say, that the issue could reoccur over time. The ophthalmologist recommends this be a “one and done” shot at correcting it. If it reoccurs, the chances that it will continue to do so is apparently high no matter how many times we go after it. At that point, the course of action is to leave well enough alone since it’s not life threatening. I don’t think he or I have the appetite to chase diminishing returns.

Doc says the eye will probably end up looking “a little wonky” because of how much material they cut out. We’ll see how things look when the swelling comes down. Not that it matters. We may also have to revisit her third eyelid. He’s optimistic it will retract more on its own when the swelling goes down, but if it doesn’t, we’ll figure out what the right approach is – somewhere between do nothing and a follow-up surgery.

Our girl checked out with a bag of pills and drops to administer over the next few weeks. I’m (mostly) happy to be leaving that part of the recovery process in the hands of professionals. I’ll hate not having her here, but that’s entirely outweighed by the benefit of making sure she’s getting her meds in a more timely and less traumatic way than I could possibly manage on my own. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy to have a proper medical staff watching for infection or any other potential post-operative issues… and I’m obviously thrilled that I’m not going to be the bad guy chasing her down and forcing meds on her for this stage of things. 

For now, Anya is a temporary resident of Pennsylvania. How long that lasts remains to be determined. I’m satisfied that the surgery went well and we’ve hopefully improved her quality of life in spite of whatever short term trauma we might have caused… I’ll be happier, tough, when she’s back home bouncing off every wall and flat surface in the place.

Not for the faint of heart…

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Anya is scheduled for eye surgery next Tuesday. The plan is to remove some of the conjunctive material currently obstructing her left eye as a result of the repeated eye infections she went through early in life. The underlying eye is mostly undamaged and this operation is intended to remove the existing trouble areas in order to prevent them from eventually adhering to the eye itself. It’s not inexpensive, but it’s work that needs done that should improve both her long term health and her ongoing quality of life.

She’s expected to be discharged Tuesday afternoon with a new round of oral medication and eye drops. Some of these could need to be given as often as every six hours for the first several weeks as she recovers. How a normal person who has a job or any other commitments can arrange to do such a thing is entirely beyond me. I get that the discharge instructions present the optimal course of action, but expecting an owner to be able to pin down a cat and deliver these meds on 16 separate occasions every 24 hours strikes me as perfectly absurd. Each drop, after all, should be followed by a 5-10 minute waiting period, so it’s not as if you could grab her up just 4 times a day and apply everything in a single go. I’m not embarrassed to say that I may have hit the panic button when I caught wind of what the coming weeks could look like. There’s simply no way I could sustain that level of post-operative care for any length of time.

Over the last four or five days, Anya has gotten increasingly combative and has started running away any time I walk into a room. She’s actively avoiding me, cowering, and essentially seeing me as an enemy. With most shelter cats, the advice and expectation is that they’re going to have some amount of time – weeks or months – to decompress and acclimate themselves into their new home. Anya never got that time. Three days after her arrival, I had to start holding her down and pouring meds into and onto her. It’s little wonder she’s losing whatever little bit of trust we may have developed.

Mercifully, I’ve got a friend who helps run a large veterinary practice outside Philadelphia. She’s going to arrange medical boarding for this poor gray fur ball for the duration of multi-time a day treatment. There, the techs will be doing the heavy lifting of keeping up with the schedule seven days a week and the on-staff vets will be around should something need to be addressed immediately. So, as soon as she’s released from surgery, we’ll be taking a short road trip through southeastern Pennsylvania to her temporary home.

Since Anya’s particular flavor of eye infection is often triggered by increased stress, boarding isn’t entirely ideal. It does, however, feel like a better option than having this poor animal at home with me stressing her out and inevitably missing doses of the medication she needs to recover from the surgery in a timely manner. It’s a real devil’s bargain.

I asked the doc yesterday if waiting until Anya was more settled here at home and more comfortable being handled was a reasonable option. He was of the opinion that although the eye isn’t currently an emergency, addressing it was something better done sooner rather than later as it created less overall risk to her sight in that eye.

I absolutely hate the thought of her being gone for two weeks or more, but I hate the thought of irreparably damaging what needs to be a trusting relationship with her even more. I’ve never shied away from getting my animals the best possible medical treatment I could find, but damnit, this one is hard because I don’t have the skills, nor the ability to learn them fast enough, to even be a part of the recovery process. Even if I did, Anya isn’t in the right headspace with me yet to give me the benefit of the doubt.

I know she’s going to be in good hands. The friend who’s helping me by arranging all this for Anya was also responsible for bottle raising Hershel before he came to live with Winston, Maggie, and I. I couldn’t possibly trust anyone more to keep a proverbial eye on my girl and make sure she’s getting everything she needs to get well. Still. The next weeks are going to be tough in a whole different way than the last month was hard. There’s a mile of difference between knowing what’s best and actually wanting to do it. It’s one of those times when the best interests of the animal have to be pressed well above my own selfish desires.

When all this is over, I’ll be putting on a masterclass about the hazards of taking on “project animals” from the shelter. She’s mine now. I’ll see it through. But Jesus, it’s not for the faint of heart.

Lack of supervision…

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Today was the kitten’s first full day at home unsupervised. I was pleased to arrive home to find things more or less in one piece. I was almost expecting furniture to be destroyed, shelves emptied, and every exposed wire in the house chewed through, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case. A few things are askew and that seems to be the limit of their adventures today.

Based on the film, I’d guess they spent most of the day loitering under my bed since they didn’t turn up in any of the camera-friendly rooms for large swaths of the day. That’s almost assuredly a harbinger that sometime around 7:30 tonight, one or more cats will go batshit crazy and race through the house periodically with little or no notice.

It occurs to me that living with these girls is a lot like having a new dog in that a tired critter is often a good critter. Since I wasn’t available to make them tired, I’ll pay the price overnight while they entertain themselves. It is, of course, also hard to tire out a cat who isn’t particularly interested in doing anything much beyond laying under the bed keeping an eye out for any unwelcome approaches.

I’m not at all sure I did the right thing by giving them the run of the house. Between Cordy’s determined hiding and Anya’s increasingly determined resistance to being caught when it’s time for her medicine, I wonder if it would have been better to leave them confined in the bathroom. At least there they were easier to corral and handle as necessary. While they’ve proven, so far, to be non-destructive, having the freedom of the house has simply made working with their various needs much more challenging.

As an animal person, I’ve often found myself challenged by making decisions of what, really, is the right thing to do – both in terms of their best interests and my own. Experience informs a lot of those decisions, but sometimes it too is deep, echoey silence.

Slow progress with a scaredy cat…

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For obvious reasons, I haven’t been giving equal time to the two new additions. Where Anya has required multiple daily rounds of medication and came out of her shell fairly quickly, Cordy has remained largely reluctant and uncertain. Technically, she’s largely remained firmly tucked into the cardboard base of their inclined scratching platform.

If the paperwork is to be believed, Cordy went from living in a park to being trapped and hauled in to the shelter and then moved onward to my house all in a span of four or five days. For a three-month-old kitten brain, that’s got to be just about as much new experience as anyone would want to deal with. I’m not at all surprised she was mostly shut down for the first two weeks I had her.

She’s making slow progress – coming out at meal times and grudgingly playing with the business end of a feather wand, if only briefly before beating a hasty retreat back to the safety of her box.

For the last three nights, somewhat unexpectedly, Cordy has emerged from her safe space while I’m checking in with them before “lights out.” She’ll pad cautiously across the room, rub against my leg, and stand still for a few pets from ear to tail before losing her courage and jumping away. This morning, while I was doing a last check before leaving for the office, she did it again.

Even as I’m sitting here typing it out, it doesn’t sound like much… but it’s leaps and bounds of progress for a cat who was more or less shut down for the first two weeks she was here. It’s progress and I’ll take it. I’ll take as much progress as we can muster between now and the first week of April, when Anya’s scheduled for eye surgery. I’m fully expecting that to be a giant step backwards for all of us.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. AFGE Local 1904. Here we are 25 weeks past the “end of max telework” and the union, such as it is, still hasn’t come through on delivering the new and improved telework agreement. So, we’re still grinding along with only two days a week like pre-COVID barbarians… as if 30 months of operating nearly exclusively through telework didn’t prove that working from home works. All this is ongoing while hearing stories of other organizations tucked in next door that are offering their people four or five day a week work from home options. It’s truly a delight working for the sick man of the enterprise. I’m sure someone could make the case that there’s enough blame to go around, but since the updated and perfectly acceptable policy for supervisors was published 25 weeks ago, I’m going to continue to go ahead and put every bit of blame on Local 1904 for failing to deliver for their members (and those of us who they “represent” against our will) and for continuing to stand in the way like some bloody great, utterly misguided roadblock. No one’s interest is served by their continued intransigence. The elected “leaders” of AFGE Local 1904 should be embarrassed and ashamed of themselves.

2. Introductions. I’ve been doing my best to make introductions between Jorah and Anya this week (Cordy is distinctly uninterested and mostly remains hunkered down in her box). I don’t remember the level of heartburn I feel about this process being quite so strong last time. That’s one of the problems with new pets, I suppose. It’s one of those things that happens so infrequently it’s entirely possible to forget the chaos and angst when the time between making new additions stretches into years. I desperately want to be able to give them the run of the house and restore some semblance of ongoing normalcy. The biggest threats to that at the moment seem to be a) Figuring out how to keep up Anya’s two-a-day eye drops without needing to chase her through the entire house and b) How best to continue encouraging Cordy to be just a bit more social. 

3. Republican “leadership.” If I see one more Republican “leader” say some goofy bullshit like “weaponized prosecution” it’s entirely possible that I’ll just lose my ever-loving mind. As usual, members of my former party seem determined to conflate being persecuted with something happening that they happen to personally not like. If anything has been weaponized, it’s the rump shell of the Republican Party who have raised incompetence, hypocrisy, and outright deceit to breathtaking new levels.

Overthinking the process…

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I’m an over thinker. I’ve been that way since I was a kid, when I’d regularly worry myself sick about whatever issue my dumb brain chose to fixate on that day. I tend not to make myself sick anymore… although my blood pressure range might indicate that’s not entirely true. Still, I tend to dwell a lot on things that other people might tend to breeze through.

Now that I’ve at least gotten Anya to roam the house for a few days while I’ve been working, the next obvious step is trying to make a decent introduction between her and Jorah. In the olden days – or as I remember it from the early 1980s, when someone who came home with a new cat would just turn them loose in the house and let nature take its course as the newcomer sorts out the household routine, resident animals, and the dos and don’ts. 

Now, deep in the kinder, gentler 21st century, we have a thousand websites and experts with their own 47 step process for introducing new animals in the home. They seem well intentioned, to be sure. Maybe they’re even advocating the Best Possible Way™ to do things. The thing is, as much of an animal lover as I am, I’m not in a position to dedicate every hour of every day to catering to their every need. I’m happy to provide fresh food and water, unconditional affection, a safe environment, and if needed, specialized medical attention… but at some point, I need them all to simply exist together, even if it’s not a love match.

Much like I had to resort to old country vet methods of getting medicine into Anya, I’m beginning to think I’ll need to adopt the old ways to get these introductions over the hump. I don’t mind keeping a few gates up so the new felines have clear lines of retreat, but continuing to cycle between loose dog and loose cats every couple of hours feels like a ridiculous way to keep going indefinitely. Of course, all of this is only true for Anya, as Cordy continues to steadfastly refuse to abandon the comfort of their safe room… so we’ll need to do this all again if and when she decides to emerge into the broader household.

I’m trying to mentally prepare myself for one more big effort here – and I’m tired just thinking about it.

Diagnosis and the way ahead…

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Anyanka had her follow-up exam with the ophthalmologist today and we’ve arrived at several conclusions. 

First, Anya is a carrier for feline viral rhinotracheitis (FVR), often called “cat flu” or less popularly known as kitty herpes. Odds are the virus was transmitted by her mother at or shortly after birth. The virus often presents as a standard upper respiratory infection with the expected coughing, sneezing, and watery eyes, but it can also cause a nasty infection of one or both eyes – in Anya’s case, her left. 

There’s no “cure.” Barring a breakthrough treatment, Anya will be a carrier for the rest of her life and may or may not experience further flare ups. One of the most common causes for these flares is stress – things like living in a shelter environment or suddenly finding herself thrown in a crate and taken to a new home. Given how little I enjoy change myself, I’m optimistic that as things settle into a routine here, we’ll be able to minimize whatever stress she may experience going forward.

Second, most likely as a result of ongoing infection in her eye from a very young age, Anya has conjunctival symblepharon. For lack of a proper veterinary explanation, this is a condition where her third eyelid and portions of her inner eyelid are adhered. It’s why even now that the infection is controlled, you can really only see about 1/3 of her eye. Fortunately, the eye itself doesn’t appear to be damaged. Assuming no further issues, we’ll schedule surgery in about a month to correct the adhesion and try to get her a wider field of view in that eye.

Even with surgery, it’s never likely to look “perfectly normal.” That, of course, is an issue I’m perfectly indifferent about so long as it improves her overall health and quality of life. The vet’s recommendation is that this is a “one and done” effort. If for some reason the surgery doesn’t take, it’s better to leave well enough alone than try repeatedly.

I had a hunch I was getting into something when I decided on this little gray kitten hunkered down in the back of her cage at the shelter, though admittedly this has gotten more involved than I planned for originally. Whatever. Everyone wants an “ideal” kitten. After already spending three months getting passed over, there’s no telling how much longer “the cat with the weird eye” would have lingered there or worse, been returned or dumped somewhere, once they realized the cost and level of effort required to get her fixed up. She’s in no danger of that fate here.

On the good news front, the cone of shame is now tucked in the cabinet and we’re down from four medications three times a day to two medications twice a day. That level of treatment feels much more manageable, especially since the two meds we’re continuing are basic eye drops rather than the ointment that stuck to everything or the oral suspension that she disliked mightily.

Now that we have Anya on the mend, it’s probably time to shift a little focus towards helping Cordy come out of her shell a bit. Given her background as having been “caught in the wild” just a few days before I brought her home, I can’t help but feel like this is going to be a whole different kind of project. But at this point, what’s one more thing to do?

Slow progress…

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The day to day of my world can be somewhat constrained at the best of times. It’s how I like it, so no complaints. For the last week or ten days, though, it’s constricted even more than usual. 

With Jorah, I spent the better part of six months keeping him contained in the kitchen. Fortunately, the kitchen here is spacious and well lit, so it wasn’t a particularly bad imposition in exchange for easy cleanup while we conducted remedial housetraining and cleaned up his all too frequent accidents. 

With Anya and Cordy, the confinement is considerably less spacious. It may be a generously sized guest bathroom, but the apparent space shrinks down considerably when you add in two cats, a litter box, scratching post, multiple food and water dishes, multiple beds, and some toys. At the moment, the confinement is mostly for the convenience of the repeated, daily rounds of medication I’m giving to Anya. Keeping them in a single space feels somehow more humane than chasing the poor girls through the entirety of the house thrice daily. Plus, she’s currently forced to contend with the cone of shame. Giving her the run of the house while the cone restricts her ability to squeeze into space that would let her avoid any unwanted canine attention feels distinctly unfair. 

The shelter recommended a two week decompression and adjustment period before introducing the new additions to the wider household and all of the additional room to roam. That would nominally end on Friday. The plan for the moment is to maintain the status quo at least through the weekend and Anya’s follow up appointment with her ophthalmologist on Monday. It seems that we’ve gotten a grip on the worst of the infection – her eye isn’t bright, weeping red – but there’s obviously still a lot of involvement with her conjunctiva. Assuming she’ll need continuing medication past Monday, I’ll need to reconsider our options. 

With stress being consistently listed as one of the causes for flare ups of her condition, getting her introduced into the house while also mitigating her symptoms feels like it’s going to be a fine line to walk in the coming days. I’d very much like to avoid a flare up resulting in another weeks long course of drops, ointments, and oral meds.

Anyaka has turned out to be quite the trooper. Despite our rough start and her being thoroughly annoyed with the current medical regimen, she’s purring up a storm and remarkably affectionate. Cordy remains uncertain of this new home. However, she has allowed me to touch her briefly while distracted with stinky food or toys. It’s slow progress all around, but it’s progress nonetheless. 

Anxiety and frustration…

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The internet is truly a font of information. Need to know how to replace the front end on a 1953 Buick? There’s a YouTube video for that. Interested in watching other people play video games? There are more streams than any one person could ever hope to watch. There are endless “how to” blogs and videos on every topic you can imagine. The thing is, they should all probably warn you that your mileage may vary. 

Every veterinary video I’ve watched in the hopes of picking up tips and tricks for making our daily routine of eye drops and oral medication more tolerable has exactly one thing in common: They each use the most quiet, docile cat imaginable for the demonstration. No hissing, no spitting, no teeth or claws, barely even a head bob while the person fiddles and fools with their test subject. Not one single video I’ve seen has featured an angry, hostile, animal who has had minimal handling and only basic socialization with people.

The other comment, popular throughout Reddit, is that giving medication to cats “can be a two-person job.” Hey, that’s fantastic information and all, but is the expectation that I’m going to hire my own vet tech to drop by three times a fucking day for two weeks or more? Advice, it seems to me, is best when it’s practical.

That’s all a lot of words to say that the best advice available online hasn’t been particularly useful in my current situation. In the struggle just to get the job done, I’ve fallen back on the very old school (and frowned upon by those endorsing the modern, kinder and gentler approach) method of grabbing this poor cat up by the scruff of her neck and getting the treatment done by brute force. I don’t like it. She very much doesn’t like it. I have grave concerns that I’m poisoning what should be our prime time for bonding and trust building… But short of sending her off to medical boarding for the duration of the treatment, I’m simply at a loss of how else to proceed. 

I’m ending this week full of anxiety and deeply frustrated.

Making introductions…

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Tonight, we bid hello and welcome to the two newest members of the family. Both were adopted Saturday from Cecil County Animal Services. 

Anya, (AKA Anyanka; AKA Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkins; AKA Aud), is a gray shorthair with very subdued tabby highlights. Her age is estimated at 6 months. She’s named for a powerful vengeance demon largely because she clawed through and escaped her temporary cardboard carrier on the drive home Saturday and promptly laid her vengeance on me while I tried to extract her from the truck. She then made a break for it and sent me on a 30+ minute wild goose chase through the garage, only to be apprehended when she snuck into the laundry room for the food I put down as a lure.

Cordelia (Cordy), is a brown tabby and about 3 months old according to the shelter staff. Her name derives from her being attractive, popular, and thus far, entirely untouchable. Her modus operandi for the most part is to burst out of hiding for a mouthful of food or a drink and then retreating immediately back to her spot. I get it. It’s a process.

We’re working through all the usual new home issues, but also fighting a pretty nasty eye infection for Anya. In the last 36 hours it went from a minor concern that we were going to address through the shelter’s vet partners, to being outright alarming to the point that I decided couldn’t wait. As of early this morning, we’re working with the local veterinary ophthalmologist to try getting things under control. I’ve got four prescriptions that’ll need to be given three times daily for the next two weeks. I fully expect to need a blood transfusion by the time we’re done with this effort.

I’m obviously quite insane to take on this project, but with my long history of pets with medical problems, at least I had some forewarning about what I was letting myself into – with absolutely no chance that she’ll just get turned back to the shelter for being too much of a project for someone and thereby further diminishing her chance of finding a permeant home.

For now, our newcomers are sequestered in the guest bathroom until they decompress and now recover. I’m willing to let that phase of things take as long as it takes. Jorah has been interested and makes regular trips back the hall to investigate all the new smells. So far, though, he has been unfailingly polite with not much undue barking or whining.

This wasn’t exactly the plan, but here we are. With no regrets and a whole lot of nerves.