Weekly Update
It seems that the weeks are passing faster now that we have passed a month of being married. Things are less about congrats and thank you notes and more about keeping up with cleaning the litterbox and the demands of work. Luckilly we get to the point where we're both so exhausted that we don't even mind sleeping next to someone who wheezes with allergies at night.
We had a bunch of scares with the cats latley and everything seems to be fine but it's never fun. First Zeus was walking on 3 legs. Not a good start to a Sunday. Steve's mom thought it was likley a common sprain so we waited to see if it got better and confined him to the bedroom to lessen the chance of him jumping on it. In 2 days it got a lot worse. By the time we managed to get him to the vet Tuesday evening he somehow cut his paw also and it was bleeding in the carrier. When we got to the vet he was not letting the vet touch it to see it and they couldn't give him anything to make him sedated because it was so late in the day and he couldn't stay overnight. So they put a muzzle on him that covered his eyes and then tried to trim the fur on the paw. That didn't go well. Luckilly after all that trauma he got an antibiotic shot that lasts 10 days instead of having to be fed medicine 2x per day for 10 days, of which cats always hate. The thing was, we could find a cut on his paw and it was evry swolen but we couldn't see if anything was in the cut causing it and the vet things he got this from a fight with the other cats. (that have no claws and are half his size?) So we never did figure things out. But we thought that the health issues was over when he was noticeable better the next day and improved back to normal within the next 3 but we were wrong.
The next thing that came up was that Zeus was sneezing. Its an odd sound to hear a cat sneeze. On Zeus it is a high pitched sound that could only come from some kind of child's toy not a cat. We started hearing it about the time the paw issue came up but it got worse every day after that. Again we were told to wait by the vet because the antibiotic was supposed to help him get better and could address many different things at once. He didn't get better, he seemed to get worse to the point on Saturday that he wasn't eating or doing much of anything. On Monday I took him back to the vet again with his runny eye and compulsive licking and cleaning his face so that he was clean even though he was a pretty sneezy-slimy cat at that point. The vet looked at him and noted that his fever was down to 102 from 104 the last time he was in and the snot was clear not yellow or green. That combined with the one eye running determined that he thought Zeus had a common upper respratory infection from cat herpes. I was floored, how is that even possible? Apparently its common in shelter cats, not really like the human form and brought on by stress. The paw was the stress and he lived in a shelter for 6 months before I adopted him so there was the way he probably got it. Or by us bringing it home on our clothing from one of the Yates foster cats (Lincoln) that was sneezing and had a runny evey about a month ago. Ether way, he got his lyzene amino acid treats and we went about our daily routine.
Zeus is better now even though he does favor his right paw over the left and he is back to stalking cinnamon every chance he gets.
Pogo on the other hand had to get his teeth cleaned and they found that he has lost over 1 lb since December. We had them do a senior cat blood screen and everything came back normal. So we are trying to get him to eat kitten food to see if that adds some weight because it is a richer food. We don't know why he would be loosing weight, so this is another mystery left unanswered.
I love having the cats around, they are so entertaining and affectionate but the health problems can get expensive and take a full time job to figure out what is going on and how to get them to the vet to treat it. I am usually gone from 7 amd to 7 pm so it usually takes me getting a day off when a client isn't needing something urgently and taking him in. Steve always just thinks they're fine and doesn't think they need to go in to the vet. I hope he isn't that way when the hypothetical kids are sneezing and have a fever of 102. Anyway it's been a learning experience.
This weekend we decided to loaf around because Steve was in a crappy mood because he had to lay off an employee due to their business being really low for the year. This is the peril of being a business owner. So we just tried to go to Carmen & Sam's birthday picnic BBQ thing at the forest preserve (I had never done this before) and it rained most of the time. We came late so we missed the first 2 rain bursts but we got the third one. I thought I was going to get soaked as I saw the tent/awning thing fly up off its scafolding in the wind. After that in the next lull in rain we spent the rest of the storm in the car. What was weird was that about 1/2 the people bailed and went home and about half stayed, soaking wet because they had planned on spending the day there. Needless to say Steve stayed. I left and Simon drove him home at 8 pm. It was an exausting and soaking wet day.