As many know, we had our first Boston vet emergency today. Nancy has chronic constipation issues (there’s no pretty way to say that) that are usually well-managed with soft food and medicine. I don’t give her medicine every day because she doesn’t need it every day (didn’t need it every day) and now apparently she does. No big deal, the medicine is practically free. 100 days for $6. Anyway, so today I watched as she suffered. I gave extra medicine. I held up her little tail (she has arthritis in her tail which doesn’t help). I willed her to go…. but that just wasn’t going to happen.
So, with my rent due tomorrow and almost all of my money going to that little bill, I didn’t know what to do. Honestly, I don’t know what people without friends do because the MSPCA said they help people in our situation – they do not. They do not help at all. They said they would bill me the emergency fee and then if something needed to be done, then I’d have to pay for that part. Fair enough – but I knew she’d need an enema. So I drive to Jamaica Plain – not realizing that Huntington actually veers off of Route 9 (I know this now), went all the way to Brookline and had to turn around and come back – had one pissed off cat who had thrown up (hadn’t eaten so it wasn’t like it was bad) and I had no idea what we were going to do when we got there.
So they did say that they would bill me the vet fee and the registration fee ($11 to register my cat – $11? Really? To do what? Type four lines?). Meanwhile I called my vet and asked them to pull my track record with them thinking that might carry some weight – somewhere between 10 and 15 thousand between Sid and Nancy over nine years and I paid ‘em every penny. Sometimes a little slow, but I paid them. Some people buy a Hyundai, I paid to keep my kidney kid (Sid) alive. Oh, don’t worry – I didn’t drag him along for 15 years. He was a perfectly happy, normally functioning cat who had to have fluids every so often and when he would have a kidney crash, we’d go into the hospital, they’d tell me he wasn’t going to make it, I told them he wasn’t done yet – and two days and $3,000 later, I had my perfectly healthy, happy cat back for another year or two. Sid and I had an agreement – he’d let me know when he was done so I wouldn’t put him through something he didn’t want to go through. And when he was done, he let me know, and within an hour he was put down. I’m not one of those crazy cat ladies like whats-her-name on The Office who bathed her cat – with her tongue. I simply take pet ownership very, very, very seriously. It is my job to keep them alive if being alive is a possibility and that life will be healthy and happy. That is my job. And that is why Kiki and Gracie have pet insurance!
So anyway, today that job was Aimee’s. Aims floated me the money so that I could get Nancy back to happy and healthy because Nancy couldn’t wait two weeks for me to get caught up to get sick. She’s so inconsiderate like that. lol. We’re still waiting for the enema to do its job and hopefully by tomorow this will be behind us and we’ll just increase Nancy’s medicine a bit. Public shout-out to Nancy’s Aunt Aimee – don’t know what we would have done without you tonight Aims. Thanks. 
Unfortunately, while we were there, they found a heart murmur. Sid had one of those, too – an appearing, disappearing, reappearing heart murmur. In his summer from hell, he threw a blood clot and they thought he had cardiomyopathy. He was only 9 at the time, so we ran the gamut of tests. You never want to see an EKG administered to a cat because it is not done with stickers like for humans, they use clamps on their little elbows and knees – he cried (yowled), and I was bawling. Anyway, they found nothing. Sid never threw another blood clot until the day he died (they think that’s what killed him – that or a stroke) six years later. Put him through that EKG for nothing. I won’t be doing that with Nancy. Even if I had all the money in the world, I wouldn’t do that for her. She’s sixteen and a half, for God’s sake. It could be nothing, it could be the early signs of congestive heart failure or it could be an advanced sign of congestive heart failure. We will cross that bridge when we get to it, but it looks like she’s on her last life. I am still hoping she’ll make the trip back to SF with me… she and Mike love each other so much, I’d hate for them to not get to see each other again. Of course that concern is probably more mine than either of theirs. lol. Gracie is the one who is a Mike addict. If she could crawl through the phone to get to him, she would do it. Hell, I can’t blame her – some days I’d do the same thing! I just… my family, in my mind, is all five of us, and I’m not ready for that to change just yet.
But as long as this poop gets moving, she’s no more or less sick than she was yesterday, so other than making sure she gets her extra medicine and making sure she gets a little more water in here diet, nothing changes. When she’s done, she’ll let me know. I didn’t think I was ready for Sid to go – but after facing his certain death so many times before, I guess I was as prepared as one can ever be and choosing to put him down was a no-brainer. He was in pain, I wanted the pain to stop and I wanted it to stop NOW. That was a painful but very easy decision. I don’t want to make any tough decisions with Nancy unless she helps me make them for her. I do know that we avoid vets like the plague – that keeps Nancy the happiest. So… our goal is to make sure that Nancy never sees another vet again until it’s that time and we hope that vet is on the west coast. But if not, then not.
OK, so it’s 12:30 and there’s a soggy, drugged out cat on a towel where I am supposed to sleep… it’s going to be a long night. But not as long as it could have been…
