SATURDAY RAMBLINGS

Okay, Pop Cat (that’s me!) is getting nervous…

 

My hyperthyroid cat, Patches, has stopped eating and she threw up (a tiny bit) twice last night.

 

She seems okay otherwise.

 

Maybe her tummy is just a little out of whack for a time. I hope so, and I hope not for long, because she needs to keep eating! She needs to stay as well as possible for Monday’s thyroid treatment! Losing condition and dehydrating now would not be a good thing.

 

She is drinking milk. That’s protein. She just can’t drink so much that it gives her the runs, so I haven’t put out much. I want to keep track of how much water and milk she’s drinking.

 

And I desperately want her to remain as hungry as she has been recently because she needs the nutrition to offset what her hyperthyroidism is demanding of her body right now.

 

She remains purr-y and chatty when I pet her; she rolls over, tucks, and acts like nothing in the word is wrong with her. Her eyes are clear; she looks and acts healthy.

 

So I may just be hyperalert to every little thing she’s NOT doing that she has been doing–one of which was eating like a horse, which is what her vets expected and want her to be doing!

 

I went to Albertson’s early this morning to get more jars of her favorite flavor of Gerber baby food (ham) because she didn’t touch the other flavors overnight (beef, turkey, chicken). I also bought some cubed ham to puree if I run out of the baby food. (There were only four jars of ham this morning at the store.)

 

So here we sit, looking at each other. She’s probably wondering WHY!

 

I’m being  a helicopter dad today. I will be all weekend.  And I will miss her like crazy when she’s at the vet for up to ten days starting on Monday.

 

When she gets home, I can’t interact with her (hands on) more than an hour a day, and she won’t be able to sleep with me on my bed until the vet clears her to do so, which will be at least a month and could be as much as 80 days. I will have to sequester her in a room at night with food and litter box so she has everything else she needs to stay happy and healthy.

 

I will have to save and tightly contain the litter that comes out of her box for 80 days in an outdoor container.  Dumping radioactive litter into a trash barrel would set off alarms in the waste management trucks and I would be fined heavily for doing that.

 

The other cats can continue to use the same litter box and ambling spaces. I’m only being isolated from her in the ways I am to limit the amount of radioactivity that I get exposed to in my entire lifetime (from dental x-rays, chest x-rays, the x-rays I helped take when I was a veterinary assistant back in the 70’s, etc.).

 

Patches won’t be a walking hazmat cat by any stretch of the imagination. The amount of radioactive iodine that they’ll inject into her subcutaneously will be so small that it won’t pose an appreciable environmental risk to my abode, they’ve assured me. I just need to be aware that she will be radiating some so I don’t overdo glomming onto her and sleeping with her as usual.

 

Of course, I have carefully explained all of this to her. She doesn’t understand a word, but if (as I suspect) cats read/understand what we say to them via brain-based visual pictures, she might be able to pick up on my internal visualizations and discern that separate sleeping spaces will be required…

 

Truth is, I’m preparing myself as much as I am her. It’s going to be hard to sleep without knowing she’s right there. I’m so used to waking up several times a night to check on her that it has become second nature to me, and when she’s right there with me in bed, it’s easy and fast to do, and then I fall right back to sleep. Under the new protocol, if she won’t sleep happily in an inverted baby crib in my bedroom across the way from me, I will have to get up and visit her room, which won’t be as fast or easy, so I may not get right back to sleep.

 

But whatever it takes, I’ll do it.  She’s my oldest girl. She’s a survivor. She’s very special to me!

 

(Yes, my other cats are, too.  I have no favorite cat. They’re all my favorite in different ways. But Patches needs the most help right now, and the closest monitoring, so she’s uppermost in my mind right now.)