After The Alert Weekend
It's 5pm and I just woke up, after 8 hours or so at three different veterinary clinics, and a nap that started when we finally got home at noon.
Our kitty Maggie - the little pale Siamese in my icon- has has serious asthma for years. She responds really well to steroid shots, which last about two months before she starts wheezing wetly, scratching, and generally acting like a really sick kitty. The wheezes started on Friday, and while she responded well to the various pills we have to tide her over (Allie, who's a shredded bloody mess might interpret "responded well" differently!), this weekend she scared us. She seemed off in some way we couldn't clearly identify, and we were spooked.
Last night as Allie was getting ready for bed, she watched Maggie struggle to settle down, acting a bit like Fiona did in the days before we lost her to congestive heart failure. We rushed her to the emergency vet, who suspected hypertension and/or eye damage, but couldn't calm her down enough to check her blood pressure. We left there at last around 6:30 am, and I got to sleep for an hour before we headed back out to an opthalmological clinic. Maggie got checked out by two doctors, who said she was fine - BP very normal, and her only eye issues a bit of muscle degeneration from aging (she's 15). From there, we went straight to her regular vet for another full checkup, and her shot.
Upshot? She's in good health for an old kitty, and just spooked the living daylights (well, night lights) out of her humans. What we saw seems to have been all the symptoms of her aging at once, exacerbated by the end of her shot cycle: some arthritis in her front paws, a little unresponsiveness in her pupils, breathing trouble and generally feeling out of sorts. So, better safe than sorry, and now we've got really detailed documentation of her basically okay health.
Maggie, who fell asleep half upside down on Allie's lap at the last vet of the night, is sleeping comfortably, as is Allie at last. After a few minutes of pretending to be useful, I'm going to go back to join them. We'll resume our regularly scheduled existences tomorrow.
Our kitty Maggie - the little pale Siamese in my icon- has has serious asthma for years. She responds really well to steroid shots, which last about two months before she starts wheezing wetly, scratching, and generally acting like a really sick kitty. The wheezes started on Friday, and while she responded well to the various pills we have to tide her over (Allie, who's a shredded bloody mess might interpret "responded well" differently!), this weekend she scared us. She seemed off in some way we couldn't clearly identify, and we were spooked.
Last night as Allie was getting ready for bed, she watched Maggie struggle to settle down, acting a bit like Fiona did in the days before we lost her to congestive heart failure. We rushed her to the emergency vet, who suspected hypertension and/or eye damage, but couldn't calm her down enough to check her blood pressure. We left there at last around 6:30 am, and I got to sleep for an hour before we headed back out to an opthalmological clinic. Maggie got checked out by two doctors, who said she was fine - BP very normal, and her only eye issues a bit of muscle degeneration from aging (she's 15). From there, we went straight to her regular vet for another full checkup, and her shot.
Upshot? She's in good health for an old kitty, and just spooked the living daylights (well, night lights) out of her humans. What we saw seems to have been all the symptoms of her aging at once, exacerbated by the end of her shot cycle: some arthritis in her front paws, a little unresponsiveness in her pupils, breathing trouble and generally feeling out of sorts. So, better safe than sorry, and now we've got really detailed documentation of her basically okay health.
Maggie, who fell asleep half upside down on Allie's lap at the last vet of the night, is sleeping comfortably, as is Allie at last. After a few minutes of pretending to be useful, I'm going to go back to join them. We'll resume our regularly scheduled existences tomorrow.