Chris & Joy’s Critterweb

Since a certain black blob of a cat has yet again seen fit to wake the entire house before four in the morning, and I could not get back to sleep, I figured I might as well put the time to good use with some updates. This middle-of-the-might yelling through the house thing has been an ongoing intermittent pattern of his for some time and I wish we knew what to do to stop it. We’ve gone back to leaving the food bowls down at night but it apparently isn’t just a food thing.

When he does this, he sets off a chain reaction… this morning it woke Joy up first, so she quietly tried to get him to shut up, but I woke up then and once I was awake that set off an allergy fit. Figuring no one would get any sleep once I started loudly snuffling and sneezing, I just gave up and got up. Of course, once she knows I am awake, then Lindsy starts pacing through the house. This wakes up Cricket, who assumes it’s time to go outside, so she starts whining and honking (the latter because of her heart condition) and I have to let out two dogs at four AM because they have to go out RIGHT NOW — even though normally no one would be up for another two hours.

So now I am up, the dogs are up, and Winter and Olive are up. Winter has decided to get an early start for the day on menacing Olive, so I’m trying to quietly threaten her into stopping that, hoping that at least Joy managed to go back to sleep. In the midst of all this I happened to look over and see Simon peacefully snoozing on the bed by the fireplace. I threw a pillow at him. Yeah, immature, I know, but it felt good for just a split second.

Maggie is doing fabulous in her new home and it is such a big relief to have that situation resolved! The house is a lot more peaceful without her radiating misery like a flashing neon sign. She really wasn’t happy at all in this house, no longer having the fenced yard to hang out in, or anywhere we could walk her, and she hated the cold. Besides the stress of worrying she’d bounce over top of one of the ‘broken’ animals inadvertently, we knew she was miserable and this made us more stressed, which she picked up on and that caused her to be more anxious, and… well, you get the picture. It worked out so well for everyone involved and we were incredibly lucky to find her a home where she could ’shine’. She sleeps on a bed with a member of her new family at night and last we heard they were gradually phasing out the crate. We are so happy for her!

We thought that finding Maggie a home would quiet things down here for a while but Cricket decided to have another epic health crisis a week later. Actually she went downhill so badly we actually made The Appointment and burial arrangements. The day after we called the vet she decided to start eating again, and rocketing through the house like a dog about 15 years younger, so we’ve canceled it. What happens is that she will get pickier and pickier about what she will eat, until she goes off food entirely and makes herself ill. Usually it’s some sort of sugar crash that we can fix by force-feeding her Nutrical, but this last time she made herself really sick.

She had decided that all she would eat was moose meat (we’d gotten a bag of scraps from someone on freecycle) which is pretty much pure protein, no fat at all. After not taking in any fat or carbs at all for about five days, she essentially used up all her energy and crashed, giving herself nasty diarrhea in the process. In retrospect, we should have seen that one coming, but at the time I was just happy that there was something she would actually eat consistently, and didn’t think of the long term effects.

Our new strategy with Cricket is ‘tasty junk’. Specifically, 88 cent pot pies from Ingles. That was Joy’s idea, and in my opinion, it was a flash of brilliance. Cricket sucks that stuff down like it is the absolute Best Thing Ever. Yes, it’s full of salt, and who knows what else, but she’s been on borrowed time for over a year now and if that makes her happy so be it. It’s the closest thing to a balanced diet we’ve been able to get into her in the past few months. We’re not happy about having to smell cooking meat in our kitchen (or at least some chunky, vaguely meat-like substance) nor the non-greenness of the whole ‘prepackaged processed crap’ thing, but sometimes you just have to pick your battles.

We had originally planned on dressing all the animals up and getting them into a picture together but didn’t quite get that off the ground. We did get a few pics of Simon, Olive, Lindsy and Mojo in costume, though. And a few of Lauren the blob.

I’ve been feeling a little overwhelmed lately and I suppose the lack of posts lately has reflected this. Continuing from June 11th’s post, here’s the latest:

Wednesday is feeling fine now, the vet thought maybe the intense vomiting was brought on by stress but with all the surgeries and boarding she’s undergone because of her bladder issues, never having an episode like this before, we’re a bit skeptical. My paranoid, suspicious side wonders if in the heat of a busy day at the clinic, a vaccine (she has a history of vaccine reactions with symptoms like what she showed) or other medication was inadvertently given to Wednesday. I suppose we will never know, we’re just relieved she is OK. Joy’s big fear that night was that that her bladder had burst along the scar of one of the previous incision sites when they were trying to express it. She’s even better than I am at conjuring up worst-case scenarios.

On to Mojo, who was becoming uncoordinated, stumbling, and collapsing in the midst of vomiting up bile. Several members on the Bull Terrier Neurological Disorders group suggested syncope, or fainting, and one person said that her dog had suffered the same symptoms and the vet diagnosed something called ‘vasovagal syncope’. When I took Mojo to the vet, that is what he diagnosed in Mojo’s case, too. Basically (and I am sure I will garble this explanation terribly) the pressure from the hard abdominal press when he was vomiting stimulated the vagal nerve, causing a sudden drop in blood pressure and brief loss of consciousness. I am guessing because he stopped heaving as he fell each time, this remedied the situation and that is why he didn’t go ‘out’ completely.

Apparently it’s a pretty well-documented quirk, and based on what we’ve seen, the vet did not feel there was any underlying heart condition causing this, he said we should just document it and see if anything else happens. If he started having spells at other times we would want to do an echo cardiogram, even have Mojo wear a monitoring device for 24 hours, but based on just what had happened he didn’t think there was anything to worry about. He did a thorough exam including listening to his heart for a good long time, and everything checked out OK. We will make sure that he gets some sort of midday snack from now on so he doesn’t have an empty tummy for so long. I worry that his medication is a contributing factor to both the syncope and the vomiting, but an attempt this week to try and lower the dosage slightly had very negative results so right now I guess it is just a risk we have to take.

The other furkids are holding up. Lilly is still plugging along same as always, the bloody stool has resolved so it was most likely the different food we had been giving her, setting off her irritable bowel. Olive’s allergies aren’t too bad right now, but Simon has a weird lesion on his nose. Joy has been doing some research and it looks like his nose and eye issues may be due to feline herpes. Lindsy had some sort of spell for a few days where she was really grouchy but she’s feeling better now.

Just thought I would share a typical view from the chair in front of the computer at home.

It’s been a while since I posted any entries here… we had the big uproar with Lilly and then lost two rats in as many weeks and there just didn’t seem to be a lot to say. Especially since Lilly’s trip to the vet’s resulted in her ripping out one of her teeth and chipping several others in a cage while at the clinic, and we were rather uncomfortable with the way the situation was handled. I’d rather avoid the details and just move on from here…

Results of her tests did not point to anything other than a stubborn urinary tract infection. Good news is that it was a bacteria that is susceptible to penicillins, so she is on Amoxicillin for 8 weeks. No kidney disease, nothing very out of the ordinary on the bloodwork or X-rays, no obvious sign of Cushing’s, definitely no kidney or bladder stones. She still acts very odd but who knows how much discomfort the infection is causing her? And we still get the sense that we are missing something, somewhere, with this but we are at the limit of what we can do (financially speaking) and maybe we just worry to much. We’ll see what happens with the antibiotics.

Lindsy is fully recovered and no sign so far of that eye growth coming back. We did find a lump on her belly that wasn’t there before. Vet said it was nothing to worry about but we’ll probably get a second opinion on that, it’s near one of her mammaries and she was not spayed before her first heat. Mojo is doing fantastic with his compulsive stuff but terrible with his allergies. We had to put him on Prednisone which seems to have weirded him out a bit. Thankfully we start tapering the dose back tomorrow and I hope he’ll be better after that.

Oh — our lawnmower died and we replaced it with a non-polluting, old fashioned reel mower. Works great, no more worries about gas or oil or trying to start a mower, good exercise for us and much better for the enviroment. We’ve very happy with it.

Last night we decided to take the dogs for a short walk around the neighborhood. We’d gotten a few houses away when Lindsy stopped and sniffed at something in the grass; we looked down at a small lump that appeared to be nothing but a gaping yellow mouth.

After quickly pulling the dogs back a safe distance, we assessed the situation… there was just the one baby bird out in the grass, no nest that we could see anywhere, and no anxious adult birds. It was definitely not a fledgling that could flap up into a bush to get away, in fact, closer examination revealed it to be a very young bird, not yet strong enough to stand and mostly naked and pink where it wasn’t covered in downy fuzz and spiky quill-looking pinfeathers. Since our neighborhood is full of outdoor cats and dogs that are let loose, there was no way he or she stood a chance out there in the grass, even if the parents were still feeding it. So we cut the walk short and trudged back home with our new guest.

I have actually raised baby birds before in the past, but with our busy schedules and six predators in the house trying to raise it ourselves was just was not a practical idea. Instead, the plan was to keep the little guy safe and warm until we could get the bird to someone better equipped to take care of it. If we’d found it a half hour earlier, we could have dropped the baby off with A & B Animal Clinic (who work with a bird rehabilitation group called On the Wing Again that raises and releases orphaned birds) but since they were already closed for the night, we needed to take care of it at least until morning. We set the baby up in a cat carrier with a snuggle-safe heating plate and hurried off to find a pet store that was still open and carried baby bird formula.

We fed the bird two small meals last night and then every hour today until I dropped it off with the vet’s office; the clinic confirmed it was very young robin. At the last feeding before the trip to the vet’s, he (or she?) was showing a lot more strength and vigor and would wobbily stand up and flutter those little half naked wings while reaching for the syringe with his/her big yellow cave of a mouth. I think this one will survive just fine.

Here’s one more picture of our visitor, waiting for breakfast this morning. Click the image for a larger version.