What, you may be wondering, cost $1456.82?
Was it a ridiculously over priced purse?
Was it a plane ticket to somewhere far away?
Was it a deposit on a new apartment?
Before you get excited for me and my shopping take a deep breath and calm down, because it was none of those things. Nope. That was the cost of the vet bill for my cat Striker.
Yup, that’s right, my little bundle of floof just cost me $1456.82 and while he is worth spending any amount of money on, omg that is such an expensive bill! His appointment, while stressful, did have some funny moments so feel free to grab a drink, settle in, and enjoy our little vet adventure.
Striker has been feeling off for a couple weeks, not eating normally, not sleeping normally, not pooping normally (sorry for the tmi, he’ll kill me if he finds out I’m sharing his personal business online, but lucky for me he doesn’t know about my blog! lol 😉 ) just in general something wasn’t right. I started trying him with any and every type of food out there, hoping to entice him to eat but he barely touched anything. I didn’t know what was wrong but knew something was so I booked an appointment for him. About three days prior to his appointment I noticed a wound of some sort on his lower lip and over the course of the next three days it got noticeably worse. Me being me I started freaking out that he has cancer, severe infection of the gums, he’s gonna need his jaw removed, all sorts of things.
We get to the vet and Dr. H takes a look, weighs him, tries to see the wound on his lip, manages to squeeze a bit of puss out and notices that the wound (whatever it is) is swollen and his upper canine has pierced it so every time he closes his mouth his fang is going in to the wound, effectively stopping it from healing and keeping it open to infection.
The recommendation from Dr. H is that Striker stay there for a couple hours, be sedated, blood and urine will be drawn, the wound will be looked at and thoroughly cleaned, and we’ll go from there.
Dr. H brings me a contract to sign saying I authorize them to care for Strike and blah blah blah. Then he asks me if I authorize life saving techniques if they are needed or do I want a DNR in place. What?? Seriously? You’re asking me if I want to sign off on a Do Not Resuscitate while Striker is staring right at me?
Striker watching me from the sink in the vet’s exam room
So I grill him on just what this all means. If life saving techniques are used does this mean that after he’s been gone for 20 minutes they’ll manage to bring him back but he’ll be half brain dead and have a shit quality of life? Does this mean he’ll be on the other side for 10 seconds and they’ll get him back and he’ll be fine just down one life? Is this basically CPR because CPR on people rarely works so does it work on cats? Just what is he envisioning here because this is not a yes or no question. Dr. H looks at me and asks “do you work in healthcare?” lol I said no, I just work with a lot of seniors and have to deal with DNRs often.
In case you’re wondering, in the end I said yes to life saving techniques. Mostly because he said if something goes wrong they will start implementing life saving techniques and immediately call me to let me know what is happening and we can decide in the moment what to do. Which would be a horrifying convo but lucky for us we didn’t have to go there.
I get a phone call after a couple hours that went something like this:
Dr H – Sooo, here’s what happened. Striker is a very determined cat, and he really doesn’t want to be here. He shook off the effects of the sedation much faster than normal and we were only able to get the blood drawn. We couldn’t get a urine sample because his bladder is empty and we never got a chance to look at the wound on his lip.
Me – smiling and kinda proud at how strong willed Striker is
Dr H – We decided to take the catheter out and go from there. When the tech went to remove it Striker turned around and bit them. So we put him back in his kennel to give him some quiet time, help him calm down and regroup, but we can’t send him home because he still has a catheter in.
Me – absolutely beaming at the vision of Striker defending himself.
Dr. H – we instructed the tech to go to the doctor to have the wound looked at
Me – wait! Striker isn’t in trouble is he? This isn’t his fault. You’re not going to put him down because he bit someone the way its suggested with dogs right? It’s the tech’s fault!
Dr. H – No, Striker is fine, we expect this from cats.
So there I am grinning like an idiot, so proud of Striker for defending himself when in a scary situation. He is much more prone to flight than fight when shit goes down so I’m impressed with his reaction.
Dr. H then says they need to sedate him again to get the catheter out and hopefully look at the lip wound and do I authorize that. Obviously I said yes since I don’t want him sent home with a catheter in.
I get a call a couple hours later, they got the catheter out but Striker shook off the effects of the second dose of sedation quickly and they still can’t get a good look at the wound. Dr. H feels that Striker would do better at home and even though they normally would want a cat to stay a bit longer for observation after so much sedation he thinks I should come get him. Teehee. They were kicking him out lol
The test results showed negative to cancer, hiv, all sorts of things. He did show as being at the end of a pancreatic flare up, which could be why he gets sick and throws up, and why he goes off his food. He also showed as having some sort of marker in his blood that indicates he’ll potentially have kidney issues at some point but right now he is fine. So they don’t know the underlying cause for the lip wound, and weren’t able to clean it out. The doc gave Striker an antibiotic shot and an anti-inflammatory shot in the hopes the lip would will go down in size and his tooth will stop piercing it and if there is an infection it’ll die and give the wound a chance to heal. He said he wasn’t going to send Striker home with medication for me to give him since he didn’t think Striker would be too keen on taking it. As if Striker treats me the same way he treats the vet and the tech? Pfft! I do appreciate not having to deal with medicating him though.
I am to watch his appetite and the wound, if he doesn’t start eating I have to take him back, and I need to keep an eye on the wound to make sure it doesn’t get worse.
So far his appetite has come back with a vengeance. He is eating way more than he used to, but I figure he has two weeks of barely eating to make up for so that’s ok. Would be nice if the only food he decided he will now eat wasn’t a $3 per can wet cat food but really, if that’s what he’ll eat, what am I gonna do, not buy it?
Oh, and side note, he has let me open his mouth and look at the lip wound daily without issue. He’s such an awesome little guy. 🙂
The Amazing Shrinking Woman 
Leave a Reply