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How to Pill Your Cat...

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1 year ago

The week before last was the worst week of my entire life, culminating in my cat needing emergency life-saving surgery.


My grandma has been staying with me since I took him to the emergency vet for the operation. I don't know what I would have done without her. I've never had to take a cat in for surgery before. I had no idea what to expect from the recovery period and I seriously underestimated it; I can now say with confidence that dogs are easier to manage.


With cats you have to prevent them from jumping and being active. Guess what a cat does 100% of the time they aren't snoozing? We covered the counters in boxes and my grandma kept saying she felt like she was doing one of those cooking challenges on TV, with the boxes constantly in her way. If we forgot to push our chairs in at the dining table they were a hazard. (Later we discovered it didn't matter if we pushed them in because he could get up on the seats under the table!)


Now, I make it sound as if Pepperoni was running wild and stretching his stitches left and right. All things considered he was actually very good, and we had eyes on him the entire time he was out. After a few days our crate from Chewy arrived and we were able to crate him overnight and here and there when he couldn't be watched. He did surprisingly well with it, and now if we leave the crate accessible he will actually climb in there on his own. I thought that was a dog thing.


There is just one little issue: pilling Pepperoni. Yes, pilling is the technical term. He never enjoyed the process, but toward the end of his dosing of pain pills, which were tiny and blue and very clearly his least favorite, he learned how to pretend he had swallowed the pill, and then spit it out some minutes later after we'd moved on. He got out of two doses this way.


He's down to just his antibiotic now and he's more difficult here at the end than he was when we started. My grandma went home tonight and I had to pill him on my own. So far so good. Last dose is tomorrow.


I am so grateful that my grandma stayed with me for so long. I had no idea how difficult and disruptive administering medication would be. At four dosage times each day, and different meds at each time, I grossly underestimated the complexity of the process. And if I wasn't still working from home for medical reasons, I don't know how we would have made this work.

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