There is some truth to the expression "getting long in the tooth" -- The vet says that it sometimes happens in both dogs and cats that, as they age, the bone around the roots of their upper fangs starts growing
for unknown reasons and literally starts pushing the tooth out -- Apparently, that's what's happening to Jett. If you look closely, can see how they have started to protrude. On top of that, he has gingivitis around them so they are also loose. (His jaw teeth were OK. The vet checked and cleaned them at the time of surgery.) I've fed all my cats nothing but kibbles since I got them as kittens, which helps keep their teeth in good shape and prevents tartar buildup. However, they don't chew kibbles with their fangs (the vet calls them "canines," but on a cat?!?) and Jett is getting on up in years. The teeth in question were already wiggly loose and for the past week and a half I'd been living in fear that they'll get to rough-housing and play-fighting, which he still does with his youngest brother Jaks (whether he wants to or not, sometimes!), and one would get knocked out, and etc., etc., They're big teeth with deep roots. (They had to do a flap graft to cover the socket). Obviously both his age and his diabetes are potential complicating factors for any kind of procedure involving sedation.Dr. Preston was to do the surgery. He lives next door to my dentist, Dr. Morgan. (I've been dealing with a cracked tooth with a root abscess and am about halfway through a root canal on it, myself, so I can empathize with the little guy.)
Well, I fasted him Sunday night, and Monday morning, I caught him and shoved him in the crate (literally) and got him down to the vet -- he just howled the whole way -- only to find out that I had written the date down wrong and the surgery was scheduled for TUESDAY, not Monday. Needed a fasting BSL on him anyway so got that -- 197 -- under 200, so that's good. I felt like such a rat! They all know that when mommy takes the food up at 10 pm (and hollers at Gobi for whining about it until 2:30 am!) that somebody's going to the vet, usually either Gobi to get shaved, or Jett to get a fasting BSL. Everybody had slept on the bed the past two nights, and Jett was sleeping by my pillow. Poor guy. He had terrible halitosis. The extraction seems to have cleared that up.
I'd felt so full of forebodings Monday and Tuesday. Kept thinking of poor Sister Shadow. After I got him home Monday, I went to put the carrier up, and it still had a label on it from it from when I lived on 21st street and had Sister's name on it as it was her carrier.
So I have to do the whole fasting thing again, and get up at 7 o'clock again, get dressed and go boot up my computers. I think Gobi knew it wasn't him. Jett was hiding in "The Forest of Chairs" under the dining table, and Gobi came over and stood by him a while and then came over to me and wanted some reassurance. I managed to catch Jett, again, literally stuffed him into the carrier, again, and went beetling off to the vet at quarter of 8. When I got him checked in for his bilateral upper fang-ectomy and teeth cleaning, they told me I could come get him after 3 pm, and that no news was good news. After the tech took him and I was on my way out, a woman came in with a carrier. She had obviously been crying, and still was. Took the carrier into an open exam room and left it and headed out the door, still crying. I choked up and had to almost run out to the parking lot. Don't even know what kind of animal it was -- dog or cat -- or even what was wrong with it.
So home-again, home again, jiggity jig, and try to settle down to work. I'm thinking if the phone rings, I'm going to come unglued. All morning, work was only dribbles and drabs until about noon when we got really busy and then I looked up and it was creeping up on 5 pm, and the vet closes at 6, so I go Yipe!, grab some shoes and go pelting off to the vet to ransom the little critter, that'll be $532, thank you very much!!!. They give me his Rx's, and my instructions, and off we go.
Wouldn't you know, before I can get him home, he pees in his carrier and gets it all over his tail and lower belly fur, and as he walks out of the carrier, he leaves little wet footprints on my kitchen rug. The poor boy has just gone through the whole "being at the vet/having surgery/being doped up on drugs" ordeal, so I'm not about to put him through another ordeal by grabbing him, plopping him in the bathtub and washing him. I just dry him as best I can with paper towels, and then wash him as best I can with wet paper towels, and dry him off again. They tell me he's supposed to be on soft food for two weeks, and naturally he heads straight for the kibbles. So I've got a cat with pee all over his tail and hindquarters heading across my kitchen rug for kibbles that he's not supposed to have, and I've got a carrier with cat piss in it sitting in the floor in the kitchen. I shift into Keystone Kops fast forward, do an end run, grab the kibbles and put them on the counter, grab a long strip of paper towels and go after him.
Right in the middle of this flurry of activity, here comes Gobi, who promptly gets totally bent out of shape because Jett has cat pee and vet smell all over him. Gobi launches into his famous hissy face/growly puss routine, and gets Stormy all upset, and they're growling and hissing at each other, Jett, me, and half the furniture. Jaks doesn't know from nothing. He evidently isn't old enough yet to get very territorial, or else he's just clueless -- possibly all of the above. However, he is vastly entertained by all the brouhaha and wants to get in the middle of it and stir things up some more. So here I am trying to clean up Jett, with Gobi going ballistic and Jaks going into his bouncy Tigger routine and I need to feed Jett something because it's been about 15 hours since he's eaten anything.
The vet folks must have been giving him the kitty equivalent of D5 because when they did his labs, they had to give him 2 units of insulin at about 2 pm. So now I have to get out my food processor and grind up kibbles to make some kibble mush for Jett, and the food processor makes a terrible racket doing its thing. (I have this mental image of a beaver in a hard hat and construction worker tool belt yanking the pull starter on a beaver-size chain saw so he can cut another tree for his dam. . .) Fortunately, Jett is still so out of it -- his pupils are huge and he must be higher than a kite on pain meds and residual sedation -- that the food processor noise doesn't phase him. I grind him up some kibbles and mix the powder with water, and make him some nice kibble mush -- it starts out soupy and after a few minutes, it really soaks up the water to the point that it gets curdy like very soft cottage cheese. Oh, boy! We are so hungry! He just tucks right into it. but his tongue is so spastic that until the mush curds up, only about half of it is actually getting down him, and as he's trying to lap it, he's got this whole Jackson Pollack thing going on just slinging it everywhere, so I grab another paper towel or three and make him a "table cloth." (My poor kitchen rug!!)
Jett is very hungry, which is a good sign, and he goes through two batches of kibble mush, so I give him another 2 units of insulin. By now, it's almost 6 pm, and I need to get back to work, but I still have a carrier with kitty pee in it to deal with, so it's off to the kitty bathroom. (Since I have two, the one with the shower is mine, and the one with the tub is the kitties'). I whip out the antimicrobial dish detergent, break the carrier apart and scrub it down good in the bathtub. Now it's nearly 7 o'clock, so I grab a bowl of kibbles and head back to my office. I've got two growly hissy kitties wandering all over the house, one Jaks in Tigger mode bouncing about, and one stoned little boy kitty who can't settle, and here I am trying to work. Every time Gobi or Jaks wanders through, I put the bowl of kibbles down, but Jaks is the only one who will eat anything to speak of. At 8 o'clock, I feed Jett again, two more bowls of kitty mush (and get another paper towel masterpiece from Jettson Pollack) give him his antibiotic tablet and squirt a syringe full of pain med down his mouth, and skin pop him another 3 units of insulin because he's eaten so much.
I finish up my shift with a dish of kibbles on my desk and every time Gobi or Jaks wanders through, I shove it in their respective little furry face saying, "Eat, eat!" like a Jewish mother, and what with one thing and another, it's pushing 2 o'clock by the time I get to bed. So who, but who, wants to sleep by my pillow? (I'll give you a clue: His Indian name is "Peed on His Tail.") I run get one of the towels from the kitty bathroom and make a bed for him on the sheet beside my pillow. I think maybe I'll read a bit and see how things settle down. So while I'm reading, Gobi walks across the top of my pillow and stands there growling and hissing at Jett for about a page and a half, and I'm not moving a muscle because Gobi is close enough to bite me in the face if I startle him, and just freaked out enough to do it. Finally, Gobi goes back to the night stand, sits there a minute on the edge and then decides to hurl. Yes. The little schlemiel proceeds to come completely unfed all down the side of the nightstand and on the rug. So yours truly has to get up and grab another long swath of paper towels, the pet mess spray and the Fabreeze spray and clean up kitty chuck at 3 o'clock in the morning. Finally, I just turn out the light, pull the covers over my head and let them argue a while and stomp off to the living room in a huff or whatever.
I manage to snatch about 4 hours of sleep. The alarm goes off at 8 am, I go find Jett, herd him into the kitchen, feed him another two bowls of kitty mush (about 1/4 cup, all told), give him his insulin, pop his antibiotic pill into his gob, and then give him a syringe full of pain med. I have to sit there with him (all the while doing my Jewish mother routine with the dish of kibbles) until I'm sure he's not going to go into insulin shock because I haven't got the dose right. Then I stumble back to bed and sleep until the alarm goes off again at 1 pm. I've got a conference call to be on at 2 o'clock for work and I need to get up and feed the mushnik again. As I'm feeding Jett, I finally get Stormy to eat something -- it's been at least 20 hours since she's eaten any thing and she manages to bolt down about 6-7kibbles before Mr. Growly Puss comes growling through again and sends her flitting off. (As I'm looking over the last paragraph, "bowls" looks funny and without thinking, I put an "e" in it. Can you tell I've been in medical transcription for 22 years?)
Now, it's time for my call and, as I carry my bowl of kibbles into my office and sit down at my desk to boot up my work puter in case I have gotten an email cancelling the call, I notice I have a phone message. (I've got one of those cordless phones that has a base unit and multiple handsets -- 3 in my case -- and they have a little light that blinks on them when you have a message, and you can play back your messages from any of the handsets as well as from the base unit. Pretty cool.). The message is from MY dentist (I'm halfway through a root canal myself -- he didn't like the way he packed it and wants to unpack it and pack it again) saying they need to reschedule the appointment I'm supposed to have at 3 pm that afternoon. Their office is closed for lunch from 1-2, so I have to wait to call them back until after my 30-minute conference call that my boss has scheduled for every Wednesday at 2 pm, smack dab in the middle of my day off (hiss! growl!) -- although I should count my blessings. Back when I worked 9 pm to 5 am, I'd have to get up in the middle of the "night" to do conference calls! I suppose it's par for the course, thought that now that I work days, the conference calls are invariably scheduled on my days off. . . . .!
So after my conference call is over, 10 minutes early, I call the dentist and reschedule, then call the vet -- I'm not sure I can do this two different kinds of food thing for two whole weeks -- ! So I debrief the tech on the mission so far, and once I explain all the ramifications, she says, "Oh, we just tell owners that about the soft diet because they always seem to be calling in because their pet won't eat after tooth extractions. If he wants to eat kibbles, you can let him." Well, hallelujah! Right after I hang up, down go the bowls again, and Stormy comes in and eats again. Poor little tyke. She's probably half starved. Jett is still going to be offered kibble mush, because I have about half a cup of ground up kibbles that I don't intend to throw away if I can help it, but now I'm just supplementing the kibbles with the mush.
At some point tomorrow, I need to take the brush to Jett, brush him good, strip down to my birthday suit (because when I plop him in the bathtub, he gets a bath and I get a shower!) and clean him up. But sufficient to the day is the evil thereof, or to quote Ms. Scarlet O'Hara, "I'll worry about that tomorrow." It's beddy boo for yrs trly.
No reading tonight, although I would like to. The book I've just started is called "The Reader" by Bernhard Schlink, which has been made into a movie starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes. I saw a trailer for the movie on TV last week -- it looked very interesting. I saw it was based on a book, got on Amazon.com, searched for and found it, and saw that used copies were available. I bought a "like new" copy for a price which, including shipping, was more than half what the book would have cost new had I bought it at the local Barnes and Noble, and it arrived in three days. Maybe tomorrow I'll treat myself to a good long read. We could all use some chill time.
0 comments:
Post a Comment