I admit it hasn’t been the best of weeks. My cat’s still gone, I have a cold, I’m in the middle of a plumbing nightmare that involves 4 trucks, 10 fans, punched out drywall and 5 guys named Joe looking solemnly at my wet walls saying, “This isn’t good.” So you will forgive me for not being my usual cheery self when I tell you about the cat rodeo this weekend.
I arrive at work, itchy nose, empty wallet, crabby mood, only to be greeted by not one, not two, but four hissing cats who are just as unhappy to be there as I am. And these were not your garden variety angry cats- they were of the Tasmanian Devil caliber, the kind who can work themselves up into whirling dervishes of spittle and claws in as long as it takes to say, “Hi Precious!”
To make it better, all but one were obese. This poses additional challenges: one, they have no scruff to hold onto. Next time you go to the aquarium look at the seals and imagine trying to hold one firmly by the neck. Two, obesity makes my favorite method of restraint- the chemical type- riskier. I asked what they were there for, and all but one were there for checkups. No health concerns, but since it’s been six months since they have terrorized our doorstep the owners would like to have us once more play Russian Roulette with our limbs and oh, can you clip their nails too?
I look in the first cage. The cat glares back from beneath a heavy brow. I hear a deep, low growl, very low, then realize it’s coming from the cage below, where a paw is extended through and swiping in an attempt to draw first blood. In an ideal world, one should always evaluate your patients for health status before giving them sedation; but in some cases, it is, to put it mildly, completely impossible. Especially with cats- the more angry you make them, the more wild they get; once they cross a certain point you stand a better chance of shoving a Volkswagen through a window than you do of getting a safe hold of him or her.
I call the owner, who incidentally is an extremely fit athlete-type who inexplicably does not agree that 19 pounds is a dangerous weight for a cat. I offer him a choice:
“Fluffy is a little upset right now,” I say in the understatement of the century. “We can send you home with some oral sedatives and try again another day- no rush, since you have no health concerns. Or we can do x,y, and z and knock her out with heavy sedation in order to get her exam and nail trims done. I think that’s a little overkill myself, and remember that this does carry an increased risk of complications up to and including cardiac arrest and death, but it’s up to you.” Guess which one he chose.
I tell my tech to get the cat out. She refuses. I tell her to man up. She tells me to do it myself. The cat watches with bemused glee. We end up taking out a heavy blanket, one of those thick twiney types you get in Mexico, and toss it over the cat, who starts to howl in protest. While my tech holds down what we hope is the head, we inject the butt-ish area with some tranquilizers, then leave the cat to rest.
A few minutes later, my tech reaches in to remove a more compliant, comatose Fluffy. Fluffy feigns comatose pretty well. Halfway out of the cage, her eyes snap open, she clamps onto my tech and lets out a Braveheart-esque cry for freedom, then makes a run for it. While three staff members wrestle furiously to get Fluffy back in her blanket igloo with fur and yelling and bobbing and weaving, I calmly ponder my alternative career choices from the relative safety of the other side of the table. No one is amused. Fluffy eventually succumbs to the herculean efforts of my talented RVT who manages to get additional drugs directly into a vein; we get our exam done (other than the fat, nothing’s wrong); clip her nails, and leave her to sulk.
Because Fluffy is so large, all the drugs from the first injection are slowly absorbed over several hours from the fat repositories; this means that although it took huge doses to get her out, once she is out she remains there for quite some time. And because fat sedated cats can often have underlying cardiovascular disease- or other diseases- I make someone sit with them the whole time and monitor their oxygenation and pulse and all that fun stuff. The only thing worse than sedating an angry cat with no health concerns is sedating a cat with what you thought were no health concerns, but actually had heart disease, which you find out about because the cat is suddenly dead. That happened to me once. It is not fun.
Doing this once in a day is draining. Doing it four times is, well, really draining. Really really draining. Really really really really draining (one per cat.) Stick a fork in me. Or a claw, as it were.
I may not have the most popular view on this, but I’m not a big fan of cats being left in a clinic (or a boarding facility) without a really good reason- especially if you have one prone to bouts of panic induced hysteria. When they are already stressed by being ill, being in a clinic with barking dogs, loud cages, and chatty strangers is not going to help the situation. Stress hormones wreak havoc on normal biologic parameters, and it’s near impossible to get a normal heart rate, temperature, or glucose level. Unlike dogs, cats are not particularly social beings, and few things are more horrifying to them than being in a vet clinic. I think it’s wonderful (truly!) that people are invested in their pet’s well being and want to have them regularly seen, but I’m not sure how much good I am doing by knocking them out twice a year just to do a quick exam. There are other options.
Once you add up the costs, it’s no less expensive than having a home visit veterinarian come out to do your basic preventive care stuff. There are also a growing number of feline-only practices out there who cater to that segment of the population and are much better at making it a more serene experience than a typical dog and cat clinic. But if you really don’t want to go that route, OK, I’ll work with you. Especially if you are a plumber looking to make a trade. :/
This made me giggle; we’ve had several Tasmanian Devil Cats this week, except most of ours needed something, be it an abscess cleaning or rabies vaccines. The abscess cat’s owner balked at the $20 rabies booster, but once talked into that agreed readily to sedation, cleaning, and the heinously expensive dose of Convenia – I guess he didn’t want to deal with the cat any more than we did.
Convenia- expensive but worth EVERY DANG PENNY with those Tasmanian devil cats. Love the stuff.
You bring up the house call. How many people know their vet will make house calls? Here in the rural area I live in I know there are vets who will come to the house or farm because of the large animals that need vetting but I never thought it possible to have a vet come to the house until I broke my ankle one winter and called the clinic to see if the vet could make a house call for 2 euth’s. He came after office hours and put them both down. Hopefully I won’t have to have him out again, but it’s nice to know that’s an option.
i rode around with an ambulatory vet who did both small animals along with cows/horses and we probably had a few calls a week to come out to someone’s house to do vaccines on some cats/dogs. We just charged them a typical farm call (but that’s just a little more than a regular office call). Course this was rural michigan.
Hey-that’s where I’m at! Are you still in rural Michigan?
nope, back at the ivory tower of MSU (haha) only for 8 more months tho!
Well, to be fair a lot of the time it’s not their own vet who does the housecalls- at least in this area. The governing body makes it very difficult to do so, so that those housecall vets tend to do solely mobile practice. I do mention it for a certain clientele- crazy pets, elderly owners, did I mention crazy pets?
Even your not so cheery self is hilarious! 🙂 Sorry to hear about the household troubles and plumbing.
People bring these cats into the clinic that are tasmanian devil cats and I wonder what they’re like at home. I know usually the owner says that they’re great at home, but really? There are plenty of cats that come into the clinic and are calm and serene (albeit terrified), but aren’t crazy mofos. Glad to hear you survived the crazy 4 cat’s of terror day.
Hope your plumbing probs get solved soon
At least one of the owners today was honest: “I can’t help hold because she’ll bite me. She’s terrible at home too. So no to go home meds either.”
Who took over for Eyster as head of cardiology? He did a lot of work on the heart babies we brought to him. I miss having him there-we had built up quite a working relationship with him over our PDA’s a VSD’s.
I read this and totally sympathize. As a pet sitter, I sometimes get to deal with the tasmanian cat that needs daily medication and that is absolutely no fun. Sorry you’re having a bad week and I do hope it gets better.
As for the house call vets, we use one for our cats and it’s so much easier for everyone involved. One of my cats just refuses to go in a carrier and is downright a tasmanian devil himself with everyone but me, so I’m glad we have our wonderful vet come out for the wellness check… and he doesn’t even have to get scratched. I’m sure he’s happy about it too.
I hope you charge extra for those pet sitting debacles. 😉
I’ve been debating housecall for a while now. It sounds so romantic, until I think about rush hour traffic on the I-15….
Truthfully, I don’t. I probably should, but I may wait until my client base is a bit larger.
The way our vet does the house call is he only does one small area of town. Basically, a 10 mile radius that he refuses to leave no matter how much someone is willing to pay him. That way, he sees about 7-10 clients a day and never hits a freeway. Maybe you could concentrate on Sorrento Valley or something similar to that 🙂
UGh. I feel for your plumbing and wet wall issues. That sounds terrible!
And Holey Moley. I remember when clients would bring in feral cats that they wanted to spay and we’d lock the treatment room down, put on the thick leather gloves, grab a huge blanket and see what kind of mood Fluffy was in! Luckily, the cat was perfectly healthy and made it thru the procedure just fine. Let’s not forget the obese nail trim devil cat… I remember that sick-to-your-stomach-feeling of “OMG I”M LOSING MY GRIP ON THIS BEAST!!!” Ahhh, the memories… 🙂
We do very little with feral cats currently. Not sure I would agree to do it unless we started stocking Domitor.
Ugh, the “I’m losing my grip!” feeling is the worst. Usually it’s given as a warning, everyone else ducks for cover while the unlucky holder hangs on until the last possible second…
This is why I never leave Nala unless absolutely necessary. They keep asking if I’ll leave her for the urinalysis and to me that is a pretty frivolous reason to leave her considering you can squeeze her and get the urine if she drank and hasn’t gone yet. 😉
Posts like this make me so grateful for my cat. Even before she got old and decrepit she was so ecstatic around people that she was excellent at the vet’s. I always get comments on how easy it is to weigh her–if you put anything new and shiny in front of her, she wants to sleep on it. All you have to do is put her next to the scale and she obligingly gets on and starts nodding off.
She’ll walk right into a vet’s arms, hugging and purring the whole way, headbutting, whole nine yards, and keep doing it even after they do horribly invasive things to her that, you know, if I was in her position I wouldn’t be inclined to treat so lightly, haha.
The new cat, on the other hand…
Wow. I can’t imagine leaving my cat at the vet’s for a check up. She’s pretty well behaved (although after 2 endoscopies and many, many visits due to chronic diarrhea and other inflammatory issues, she’s starting to get crabbier), but she’s extremely stressed and I would hate to leave her there; we try to keep the amount of time at the vet’s to a minimum to reduce the amount of stress she’s under. They’re so frightened, I think. Anyway, I feel for you. Our family cat (he was 20 when he died, a skeletal patriarch still feared by the sheltie and my young cat) was handled with thick leather gloves by our vet in his heyday.
I remember once sitting in a waiting room with my brother while my mom and the cat went in for a check up. Unearthly yowls and screams that evoked images of severe torture started to issue from the exam room and other patients started to look a little fearful. “What are they doing to that poor cat?” one woman asked. My brother and I looked at each other, then I replied, “Probably weighing him.”
And 19lbs? That’s irresponsible. I’m sorry for that cat. 🙁
I know the situation wasn’t funny in the moment, but OMG I laughed til I cried reading about it!