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| July 21, 2009. Last living photos series. Back from vet's. |
The vet was tall, in good shape, and about sixty years
old. The assistant, a young woman with black hair and a calm demeanor, put
Amethyst on a scale and then on a metal table. She began brushing the cat with
a flea comb. There were gobs of fur piling up on the table. The vet had a
clipboard in hand. Having taken my name and the name of my cat, and noted the
cat’s weight, began to interview me about the purpose of my visit. I explained
my thesis that, perhaps due to old injuries during to periods of outdoor
roaming, the cat might be suffering from aches and pains, perhaps arthritis. He
instructed the assistant to put Amethyst on the floor and let her roam. I felt
myself blushing as I volunteered some of what I knew about Amethyst’s history.
I tried to steer clear of my idea about “the Christian Science Health Plan”,
but I told the story about the idiopathic geriatric vestibular syndrome. When I
mentioned that I had learned on the web that “idiopathic” means, “we don’t know
what causes it”, he had an odd reaction.
“Because you read it on the internet, that makes it
true?”
“Uh, no…”
“Well, what is your relationship to this cat?”
“Beg pardon?”
“I mean what do you think of her? How do you think of
her?”
“I think of her as a very beautiful animal.”
“Just an animal?”
This was such an outlandish thing to suggest. I got where
he was going, and I felt my face turning purple with indignation.
“No…she
is…also my beloved pet.”
“OK then,
that’s better. Because we expect a certain commitment to treatment.”
I was now totally disarmed, no longer in control of a
situation where control should not have been even an issue. This was a
veterinarian, a person I was going to compensate for ministering to my animal,
my beloved pet. Whatever. Meanwhile, Amethyst was exploring the place freely.
“Let’s
have a look.”
The assistant picks the cat up and puts her back on the
table. She looks into Amethyst’s eyes and her own eyes tear up. “Beautiful…”,
she says, almost whispering. “Yes. She’s seen a lot,” says the vet. These two,
I think, are talking nonsense. He’s applying a stethoscope. “Strong heart.”
He’s feeling along the outlines of her body, probing for tumors and anomalies.
This is what I expect a vet to do, I think. But then he opens the cat’s mouth
and sees the results of years of no dental work. “Yuck!” I have opened myself
up to this, I’m thinking. I’m guilty, as charged. He gets out the model of the
teeth showing various stages of decay. I’m nursing my own bad teeth in my
mouth. I hate dentists.
The vet now asks me if I’m willing to have Amethyst
sedated for a full blood workup. He explains that he has wonderful new software
that returns the analysis in about 20 minutes. He explains that the anesthetic
he will use does not “knock her out,” but instead leaves her aware but with her
body sensations disabled and her sense of time altered. “She won’t remember she
was here.” I want some of that, I’m thinking. “Are there risks?” I’m asking,
trying to regain my preferred posture as a responsible pet owner. “Certainly.
With an animal of this advanced age, the administration of anesthetic poses a
certain amount of risk. However, it is the only way to get our bearings on what
is going on with her blood chemistry. I leave it entirely up to you.”
I consent. The fur is shaved. The dose is injected.
Amethyst retches. “OK. I see what she’s going to do,” he says. In a minute or
so, though, she’s head down on the table, eyes open, mouth open, drooling,
breathing shallowly, and still. He gets out a big syringe, uses a little bit of
alcohol on a cotton swab, and draws the blood. The blood goes into a turret of
small vials. The last vial is wanting in sample volume, so he draws a little
more blood. The vet disappears into the deeper recesses of the clinic to use
his sample analyzer. He returns after a few minutes and has me take the cat off
the table and hold her on a towel in my lap. He instructs me to not cut off her
windpipe. I’m supporting her head. She has no physical resistance. She is
breathing and drooling as before, still inert. The twenty minutes crawl by.
Now comes the vet with the verdict. It is a lengthy
explanation of the physiology of liver failure and kidney disease precipitated
by toxins in the lesions of the mouth. Somewhere in there he says, “I use
everything in my diagnostic approach. All my senses, including smell.” I’m
wondering if maybe I should have taken another shower before heading to the
vet’s. I try to convince myself that he’s a doctor, and he’s talking about my
cat. In the end, he tells me that my cat is suffering from advanced and chronic
kidney disease, that she has infections in her mouth, and that her condition is
a two on that famous one to ten scale. He gives me some oral antibiotics, and
sends me home with a tube of a paste nutritional supplement called NutriCal and
a bag of Hill’s kidney/diabetes formula kibble. I also buy a carton of the
cans. He begins to flag as he works up the bill. He says that his voice is
giving out, that he’s been doing a lot of talking. The bill is significant. Also,
there was more vetting to be done. The vet had made clear that a follow up
visit would be in order.
I pick up the towel with the cat still insensible on it
and put her gingerly in the car. After some two hours at the veterinarian’s, we
are heading for home at last. I came with what I thought was an ancient but
healthy cat with an idea I would make her aging life more comfortable. I was
returning with a chronically ill cat with a new diet and meds.
Post anesthetic, Amethyst was out cold on her pet bed. She
still was wrapped in the towel that the vet had put her in. She was drooling.
Her breathing was shallow. I went about my business, looking in on her every
now and then. On one such peek, I found her up on her haunches, puking. When
she finished with that, she flopped back down. But she was now awake. After a
time, she was up and about. She drank some water. She ate some of the new
kibble, mixed in with the old. In the evening, she took her antibiotic with a
minimum of complaint. It was a relief that she’d eat the Hill’s K/D formula.
She was not as stoked about the canned version. A look at the Hill’s site
suggested that feeding both kibble and canned diminished the effectiveness of
the products, but I decided that I would give both anyway. What, after all,
made anything read on the Internet true? Was it the fact that it was published
on a manufacturer’s web site? She was always a free choice kibble eater, and
she always got canned food as a treat.
It would not have been unreasonable, after that first visit,
to seek out a second opinion. I did not even think of it. Perhaps I had been
sufficiently insulted and heavily billed to feel that I was getting my money’s
worth. Perhaps I had not really been insulted after all, that it was all just
my own projection and sensitivity. Still, I reported my impressions to Del. For
a week, Amethyst ate the new diet without rebellion. In the second week, she
continued drinking, but began to cut back her consumption of food. She also cut
back her activity level to match. I decided this was not a good sign. On July 9th,
I took Amethyst in for the first of two a follow-ups. The Doctor injected some
nutrient, some antibiotic, and sent me home with a tube of NutriCal. NutriCal,
a molasses-like nutritional supplement that comes in a tube, was familiar to me
from an earlier experience as a cat owner. I had once nursed an orange longhair
back from the brink of death by feline infectious peritonitis following a
spaying. I had smeared the stuff on the animal’s face and mouth until the cat
rebounded. Now I was going to use it to “perk up” Amethyst’s appetite. She was
a bit tentative at first, but in short order, she took a liking to the
NutriCal. This became a treat for her. It remained a jones of hers until her
final few days.
