Pets Part 2.....

As I mentioned in a previous post, we had not had much luck with cats in our family. When Sweet Girl was a senior in high school, we decided to try again and raise a kitten to be an inside cat. We found an ad in the paper for a free kitten, and she and I went to pick it out. We brought home an adorable ball of fluff whom we named Olivia. Until we took "her" to the vet the first time and renamed him Olive. Hubby called him Brutus, as he had most of our other cats.


Hubby made the mistake one day of saying if we ever got another cat, he would want a little gray and white girl. When he and I returned from vacation in Aruba that same summer, we had a little gray and white girl. Sweet Girl doesn't take casual comments so casually.

I maintain that the gray kitten, whose name is Missy and hubby calls Little Brutus, may have been taken from her mother too soon. She was a bit of a ...... how do I say this politely ....... slow learner. But she's sweet, and we soon had reason to feel even more tender toward her. One day when she was still just a baby, she started acting strangely, even for her. She was hiding from us, and she wasn't eating or drinking. We took her to the vet on a Saturday morning, and he called us soon thereafter. Seems Missy had swallowed some quilting thread, and it was looped under her tongue, with both ends disappearing down her throat. The vet said the first thing he would have to do was x-ray her to make sure there wasn't a needle attached. Ouch. Then he said he would probably have to do surgery to remove the thread, because he couldn't be sure to what degree it had become involved with her intestines.

The surgery was a success, and everything was fine for a while. Missy woke us up one night twitching and spazzing and making some very strange sounds. Hubby thought she was choking on something again, so he (unwisely) stuck his finger in her mouth. What she was actually doing was having the first of many, many epileptic episodes. They always occurred while she was asleep, usually on our bed. What a rude awakening in the middle of the night. She had one once, though, when she was asleep in her window seat, and thudded to the living room floor. Ouch. You know that old saying about a cat always landing on its feet? Doesn't apply during an epileptic seizure.

Her vet said it was not necessary to medicate her unless her seizures became more severe and lasted for longer than a couple of minutes. That's a looooooooooooong couple of minutes when you're watching a cat seize. He also said she wouldn't grow out of the seizures ...... but she has. It's been several years since she had a seizure. Knock on wood.

Olive never really had any health issues, except for what would be called morbid obesity in humans. He weighs more than our dog, Gus. And while Gus is a Pomeranian, he isn't a tiny Pomeranian. Olive is just a ..... healthy boy.

Then one weekend HE began acting strangely. He wouldn't eat .... yeah, that was our first clue .... and he started hissing at us, at Missy, at the world. He wouldn't move. I thought we were going to just watch him die right in front of our eyes. I took him to an emergency clinic on Sunday morning (yeah, that's not cheap), where they x-rayed him and said he had "soft" knees. He had probably jumped off something and dislocated his knee, and it would be an ongoing problem. They sent me home with the x-rays and told me to see our regular vet if he didn't get better.

He DID get better, at least for a couple of months. Then one weekend he started doing it again, and we were able to get him in to our regular vet. I took the x-rays the emergency clinic had taken and dropped him off at the office. The vet called me a couple of hours later, and while he isn't one to display a lot of emotion, he sounded a little incredulous. He was still looking at the x-rays while we were on the phone.

"This cat has a broken hip," he said. "I don't know how they didn't catch that."

He said the only thing to do was surgery, and I okayed it. Then he called me back a little while later, and said, "Uhhhh..... you're not going to believe this. BOTH hips are broken."

We have no idea how an inside cat managed to break both hips. The vet repaired both of them at the same time, and Olive recovered nicely. The vet told me to make a pallet for him in the bathroom and move his food and water in there with him, because it would be a while before he could navigate the stairs again. Olive was back downstairs before I was. He was a little embarrassed, however, at having the hair shaved off his back-end.
To be continued.....