Photo Friday: Welcome to the Neighborhood

Sometimes it takes time to get to know your neighbors. I hadn't seen this guy before tonight. He appeared in the yard around dusk, promptly caught and devoured a mouse, and stuck around long enough for me to not only dig out the camera but swap lenses.

This was taken with a long lens; I wasn't able to get as close as this picture suggests. Still, he's far too fat and comfortable around humans to be truly feral. I wonder where home is?

The boys, meanwhile, were fascinated but not distressed by our visitor. But then, he stayed "out there" and didn't get too close to their windows.

Somewhere, Emily is purring

Whitey still wasn't eating this morning, so back to the vet he went. They said he's becoming dehydrated (uh oh), gave him subcutaneous fluids, a prescription for Pepcid to settle his stomach, and instructions to come back again tomorrow if he still isn't eating.

On the way to the drugstore, I remembered that the vet suggested meat-flavored baby food as an alternative when Emily was sick. So I got some. Whitey rejected the portion that I spiked with Pepcid, but otherwise wolfed down almost the whole jar. Yay!

Of course, if he's really channeling his aunt, he will now refuse to eat anything other than baby food. Sigh...

As a side note, he is (not surprisingly) becoming extremely suspicious of his carrier. I had to get out the ShrimpNip to persuade him to get in it this morning. ShrimpNip is essentially crack for kittens: dried shrimp tossed with catnip. It stinks to high heaven, but overcomes almost all feline stubbornness.

Picky, picky, picky!

Whitey doesn't want to eat his most recent IAMS wet food either, that is, what we were feeding him last week before switching to prescription food.

However, he did lower himself to eat most of a different (yummier?) flavor of IAMS wet food serverd to him this morning. He skipped the IAMS dry food in the same bowl (our standard presentation), but we still have progress.

Billy, by the way, will eat anything Whitey doesn't -- this week's menu, last week's menu, next week's menu, it doesn't matter. We've taken to providing Whitey's meals in at least semi-privacy so Billy doesn't get double portions.

Just like Old Times

Things are not all roses with Whitey, he's mostly stopped eating as of yesterday evening. This could be the change in diet to prescription food, or the antibotic bothering him. We can't tell.

This morning, he threw up to boot. Katherine said that the vomit was the color of his antibotic.

In any case, it was off to vet again for him for a urine sample. Since his bladder was empty when he arrived, he got to be their guest the whole day.

The new good news: His tests came back clean, so we can drop the evil antiobotic.

The bad news: He'll only eat kitty treats (not even his old food), and we refuse to fill him on treats.

He's reminding us how fickle his aunt Emily could be, ages ago.

It's all good

Nothing but good news from Whitey's ultrasound. No large stones. No sand grains. Some mucus and thickening of the bladder wall, both of which are consistent with an infection. He needs to go back for a urine sample in a week, but it looks like we'll get out of this without serious problems. Yay!

Whitey says his stomach is cold, as they had to shave his nice luxurious tummy fur. I reminded him that it will grow back.

Whitey's big adventure

Here we go again. Whitey couldn't stay out of the litterbox yesterday, and off we went to the vet to have his urinary tract examined. (I don't blame him for not enjoying this project. A catheter was involved.) They found some signs of an infection, and prescribed amoxicillin. More worrisome, though, they found a pretty high concentration of crystals in his urine. That's potentially life threatening in male cats, since the urethra takes a fairly convoluted path and is easily blocked. EEK!

He's off to the vet again this morning for an ultrasound to see if there are any large stones. Meanwhile, we're switching both boys over to prescription food for feline lower urinary tract disease: lower minerals, plus it's supposed to change the bladder pH to minimize crystal formation.

Photo Friday: Puppy Sitting

The now departed Winnie was our guest for a for a week in early 2004. She spent time in the same backyard she first saw as a puppy. We loved having her, although her visit helped lead us to the realization we're better equipped to be cat valets than dog walkers.