Day 7 and we were delighted to hear our little trooper could come home. The vet wanted a chat with us about his home care first and so we had to book an appointment to collect him. With the first available appointment being 1pm we called my mother who agreed to give us a lift in to collect him. When visiting him we had done a lot of the trips on the bus, but we knew the journey was too long for him, given the bus takes a moderately circuitous root. The more direct car journey is about as long as he can cope with being in transit before he starts to panic a bit and before his travel sickness kicks in. Now, when we spoke to my mother on the phone, the weather was fine at her end and ours. What none of us knew was that the high ground halfway between us was experiencing some fairly heavy snow. My mother discovered this on the way over. Worse, the mini blizzard sort of kept up with her all the way to Stanley, it only let up on the mile or so down the bank from town to our house. Now my mother doesn't like to drive in the snow, and the car didn't have its winter tires on. Since the sad passing of my grandfather last year she had no plans on leaving the house till winter was over, so hadn't needed them. Worse yet, to get to the vets we had to go back to Stanley and over the Loud - a piece of high and exposed ground in north Derwentside which always gets the worst of the weather.
The journey was terrible, and more than a little frightening, but we got there and we got back with our precious cargo - who seemed really pleased to be coming home.
Sadly his joy was far more short-lived than we had hoped it would be. He came home with a bag full of medications, Loxicom for his pain to be administered at 3pm and two separate anti-biotics one of which was in pill form and had to be administered twice a day.
3pm came, and we gave him his Loxicom, or at least we tried to. He put up quite a struggle which we weren't prepared for in the least. Marie was holding him and knew exactly how to get his mouth open and at this point, all seemed well - right up until I introduced the pipette to his mouth and all hell broke loose. In the confusion we managed to get about half of the dose into the cat, the rest ended up dribbling down my wife's forearm like a scene from a cheap American porn film (I imagine, not that I've ever seen any, honestly I haven't!)
I say half, but of course, we couldn't be sure exactly how much he had managed to get into him and how much had been shot over Marie's arm. Meaning we couldn't top him up without risk of overdosing him. The upshot of which was that he only got a partial dose and the poor little guy was in a little of pain by that night when his other meds were due.
Between giving him his loxicom and his evening meds I had pop into Stanley to pick up a few things he needed. He will be confined to barracks for a while - actually we are confining him to one room - our bedroom. I've set up a desk in there so I'm working from that and there is someone in the room 24 hours a day so he isn't left alone. This left us with a list of things that we knew we would need:- A cage for resting in overnight. Being a large cat means he needed a dog cage, fortunately, my mother loaned us one of her spares. A cat litter tray since the one we had for him is too big, taking up half the cage on its own. A smaller water container for in the cage, preferably one we could clip on - since even with the smaller cat litter that still leaves limited space in there. Cat litter (he usually goes in the garden)
Puppy pads - to avoid a repeat of the dirty protest debacle. Some blankets, to make sure he had plenty for the period of his confinement in case he got them dirty.
Armed with all these purchases I returned home and prepared to administer his evening meds. By now I was dreading it.
Because he was feeling a little hurty he wouldn't eat - so his pills couldn't go in his food which would be the easy way to do it. We tried hiding then in cat treats but he spotted the rues and nibbled round him. We tried the liquid antibiotic on his cat treats too (we had some success with that method for the loxicom in the hospital one day). Sadly the anti-biotic is strong flavoured and all we have succeeded in doing is conditioning him against some of his cat treats. In the end, we had to resort to the method we had used with such a lack of success earlier in the day. Hold him, force his mouth open and put the pills and the liquid down his throat. It didn't go well. We are now both sporting new scratch wounds and the cat hid in his hiding hole, glaring accusingly at me. We have all this to go through in the morning as well when he is due another pill and a half.
Thank you to everyone for the well wishes and offers to donate. There is a donate button on the home page of this site or you can make a paypal donation to dj_ghostuk@yahoo.co.uk