Enough of the cats

Poor old Georgie is suffering this week.

He's had what I think is an attack of a urinary tract infection, but the vet is trying to make us believe is probably bladder stones and struvite crystals. Remarkable how he diagnosed that without a urine test or x-ray don't you think?

Georgie woke us up early on Tuesday morning ripping the hell of everything and yowling in the bath. Poor little thing was peeing pink stuff everywhere (although he was trying to be good and do it in the bath, sinks and shower). 

A quick trip to the vet that afternoon and Martin came away £60 lighter after paying for a stash of antibiotics, a steroid injection, a box of special urinary tract cat food which Georgie will have to be on for two months and some strange crystals to help collect a urine sample from him for analysis. 

Yep. That last one stopped me in my tracks. Collecting a urine sample from a cat. Especially a part ferral? Yeh right. After you. 

However, someone has come up with an ingenious plan. A bag of non-absorbent crystals in the litter tray that simulate cat litter so you can use a pipette to collect a sample. Great idea. Except it doesn't work.

At 6am on Wednesday morning we yammed an antibiotic into Georgie and then left him in the living room with a bowl of the special food, some mineral water and the litter tray of crystals. 

Martin returned at 2pm to find - yep you guessed it - him asleep, the new special diet food untouched and the litter tray soundly ignored. Now the vet had been pretty clear about the sample - it should only be a few hours old when they get it. So Martin had 3 hours and 45 minutes to coax something out of him before the vet shut. 

Epic fail. I won't go into the details but I suspect Martin came away feeling more humiliated than the cat. 

By 5:30pm I was home and squeezing his bladder trying to get him to give it up. No chance. 

Georgie managed to cross his legs for more than 14 hours and not give a drop until 8pm and only then because we gave up trying and let him into the rest of the house. After 10 minutes by the front door, it dawned on him he wasn't going to be allowed out and then he rushed to the nearest litter tray with the wood pellets in them. I only managed to zip across the kitchen where I was cooking dinner and slide a long thin bowl between his legs, working on the basis he would be so desperate he wouldn't be able to stop the flow if he looked down and saw white china between his legs. 

I have never seen so much fluid come out of a cat. We reckon about a third of a pint, which is massive considering the size of a cat's bladder. 

We got a sample, but I suspect it will be too old by this afternoon and we will have to try again today. 

This time he has been in the living room with food, water and the crystal litter tray since 11pm last night. 

The battle has begun. 

However, this is not the only battle with cat wee we are having.

Sophie - at 16 - has given up squatting, preferring to eject streams of urine horizontally behind her at high speed. Bless her she is in the litter tray, but it cuts no ice as everything behind her is covered in pee.

We'll get her a completely covered litter tray and see how she does with that. Knowing our luck, she'll refuse to use it.  

Then there's Fleagle. 

At post-7kg, she's now on a diet and exercise routine again as she's having problems licking her own bum. It mostly involves cutting down her munchies and treats, while upping her raw food and weighing her wet food.

She hates me.

She hasn't looked me in the eye since Tuesday night. 

Comments

[Michele Zoghbi]

Could not stop laughing all Friday afternoon to myself we had similar problems with Tana the vet just asked for a clean sample in a bare litter tray but we too were unsuccessful GOOD LUCK

[Lucy @ Smallest Smallholding]

CATS.

OH geesh. Been there. *SO* been there. I literally have scars from trying to get antibiotics into Tom, our one-time feral. I've sat watching and waiting for my other cat Mindu to pee when she had a UTI (cleared up quickly though, thank goodness). I wish they could just do as they're told, e.g. 'pee here, now please' and 'just swallow the tablet, now please'.

And they behave themselves at the vet, so when you have to go back and say you couldn't do it, you feel like an incompetent owner. You're not. They're just not scared shitless of you...