Personally, I prefer to have the vet give my cats shots. I can and I have given cats pills and liquid meds. One of my male cats is prone to UTIs and he doesn’t want pills OR liquids. He also doesn’t want to get caught and stuffed into the carrier and getting catheterized, either. At any rate, I try to talk the vet into giving him a shot to clear things up, rather than trying to catch poor Shadow two or three times a day. He doesn’t like getting picked up, either, and he KNOWS that he’s gonna get a pill or a dose of liquid.
Nowadays, we feed him the prescription cat food for this problem. It’s expensive, but it’s cheaper than rushing Shadow to the emergency vet clinic because he’s peeing blood.
On to another rant…my husband is out of town for a few days, and all the cats are sad and mad about this. Sure, they love me, but they know that they are entitled to at least two human slaves on a daily basis.
Everyone has their own comfort levels, and cats are all different. I really miss Fred, he was food and scratching motivated. I used to put him on his special chair, then give him his meds and give him a bowl of gooshy food.
Lucky, not so much. He comes to the kitchen when he hears the gooshy food being portioned out, but then I have to catch him by the kitteh handle to pill him.
Honestly, Steve the feral cat is about the best house pet we have. Lucky bites me, Bob puts Lucky in trash cans and Spike rolls off the now moved bookcase and falls out the window.
At least Spike fell into the fenced back yard. We found him hiding in the gazibo.
Kitteh handle in our house is referred to as the “tail of whoa”. Used only when previously-feral, now indoor-only cat makes a break for the door into summer.
Having had success with pills and injections for so many years, I was resistant to your suggestion, even though I really do value your advice. Lucky is not getting easier to pill, and he’s a young cat. Now he’s starting to flinch when I try to touch his head, so I did some research and am going to take your advice. Our vet agrees with you and has it available for Bill to pick up on the way home. (Vet did say he didn’t suggest it because I seemed so comfortable with pills, not to mention that Lucky is declawed and only has half his teeth.)
BTW, I’ve moved to Houston, but thanks for the offer
You are so right! That’s why his human slaves moved the bookcase and then the male one put a couple of screws in the bottom of the screens so they won’t pop out again.
I like that. The tail of whoa is most effective on bare floors, and I always try to grab as close to the base as possible.
Lucky is the only cat I haven’t been able to intimidate or bribe into accepting that he’s going to get pills no matter what. I have to sit on a kitchen chair with his tail between my legs, then scruff him to get his head high enough that I won’t choke him and then go through the teethless side of his mouth. He won’t eat afterwards, so if the pill is only partway down his throat, its is disolving there and burning sensitive tissues.
This totally worked, by the way. I got completely fed up during the snowstorm, having found my black sweaters in the floor again…all covered with cat hair. :mad:
Got a nice big piece of cardboard, some packing tape and went to work. Topped if off with a piece of double sided tape inside each pull slot for kitty gross-out factor.
I caught Prowler trying to get her paw in the slot the other day, and boy did she look pissed. :D. Busted!
Transdermal meds were wonderful for Bernie, who had to be pilled twice a day. Started off just pilling her, she started shredding my arms and hands. Crush pills in gushy food? She would eat around the pill or boot Sweet Cleo from her bowl. Crushing pills into baby food worked for a while, but then she turned up her nose to that. Hell, she even ate around the pill when I used Pill Pockets. However, she always loved a good ear rub. Bloody expensive, but kept her elderly self going for a few years past her expiration date.
When we brought home the turnipheads we have now, I made it a point to play with their paws and their ears - paws for clipping, ears for meds.
My kitty Newt has an appointment with a veterinary dentist. She got her teeth cleaned week before last by our regular vet, who found 11 (!) resorptive lesions in her stinky little cat mouth. This all came about because she’s lost weight since the divorce/moving upheaval of the last six months, and the vet has eliminated other possible causes. It seems all they can do for these lesions is extract the tooth. I am not looking forward to getting that estimate of service fees.
Missed the window to add that I was amused when I realized what the pain medication was that the vet had prescribed for Newt until we could get to the dentist… buprenorphine (aka suboxone, which is used to detox humans off heroin and as a very serious pain medication). My kitty’s a junkie!
Ah, I didn’t realize you made the permanent move already. Your techniques are similar to mine. My cats soon realize that if they need meds, they WILL get the meds no matter what. No point in fighting about it, mom ALWAYS wins.
But - when it’s a hide and seek game or a struggle with one certain cat every dang day, it gets exhausting for both of us. I have one cat who had a crazy case of uveitis in her left eye along with glaucoma that was causing it to enlarge. It had to be removed. Took her three months to get back to normal after the enucleation.
The ophthalmologist also said her right eye had a subluxated lens for which she prescribed eye drops. Turned out the eye drops stung and tasted terrible. That lasted about two weeks and I said no more. She was running away and hiding from me and she’s never done that before or since. She’s already disabled neurologically, and going blind in the remaining eye is a non-option (gets disoriented even with good vision). She will have to be put down as soon as that lens luxates because the surgery to save the eye will make her far-sighted only, and that’s just not an option for her.
The medication debacle was two years ago, and her regular vet can’t see the subluxation, so the lens has either slipped back into place and stayed there or it’s just so small that the regular ophthalmoscope can’t see it. I’m fine with that. She’s 12 now and happy and easy to pill with her anti-seizure meds and I’m fine with just watching her for when/if that remaining eye goes bad. I’m not putting her through anything more than she’s already been through.
Dang cats!
Sooo… back to what you were saying, I think you and your kitty will be happy with the change to transdermal! It would have been a “last option” for me, too. Your household sounds like its full of quite the characters!
Oh yes, kitty + buprenorphine = happy dilated pupils, purring and friendliness! I once had two of my cats get dentals on the same day, and the three days of bup afterwards were the purriest and friendliest they ever were with each other. They normally weren’t friends and just tolerated each other. Another one your kitty may get after all the extractions is a fentanyl patch. Happy, happy kitties with that stuff!
Make sure you grab high enough up. I didn’t once, despite having cats for 20+ years, and got my first cat bite with actual broken skin. The Dr said that because the hand has so many tendons, it is a superhighway for infection into the rest of the body, especially since cats have very nasty bacteria in the mouth. If the wound had been half an inch to the left he’d probably have admitted me to the hospital whether I wanted it or not. As it was I escaped with i.v. antibiotics and a prescription for horse sized pills. BF voted for the classic antibiotics shot in the a**. I vetoed.
I posted on Facebook that if my cat had been one of my clients, I’d have had to drug test her. Big dilated pupils and personality change to sweetness (from her usual orneriness).
Ok, so this is an anti-rant. Riley went to the vet today for his shots, and I was expecting to have a tale of cat holy terror to share. Usually he’s hissing, spitting, and otherwise raising hell.
The tech sprayed some sort of “happy cat juice” on the table before fishing Riley out of the carrier, and he was just as calm and happy as could be. He let everyone pet him, and didn’t even freak out when a large dog sniffed his carrier on our way out.
Is there any way you could find out what that was? I dread taking Squirrel to the vet, and he dreads examining her (she’s a defensive biter). He used some kind of awesome stuff when he had to drain an abscess on her back foot. One shot, and she fell over in less than 30 seconds. She couldn’t move at all, not even to blink for herself; they had to put stuff in her eyes so they wouldn’t dry out! That’s overkill for annual shots, though.
It was Feliway spray. I’ve seen it in the plug-in thingies but this was the first time I’d seen it in a spray. He was a totally different kitty, and he’s still mellow several hours later. I think he’s stoned…
I had tried the plug-ins for a different cat with litterbox issues and I don’t think it did anything, but this spray sure worked on Riley!
I loves it when a human manages to outwit a cat. Good job! Offers up high-5’s or whatever it is that the cool kids do now.
I love people like you. I always suggest that to people who adopt kittens, along with touching their mouths and opening them. When we were going through the adoption process, I could tell who was paying attention to me and who was looking me with a “yeah, OK, just tell me where to sign” look.
How are things going otherwise? I was thinking about you today, the battlefield and all. (and your health and other stuff that you mentioned in the mini-rant threads. I know that when cats go into kidney failure, they feel like crap until they start getting treatment and we work to keep what function they have working. I can tell that they feel better right away. You have to wait until full failure before getting treatment. You must feel like shit all the time.)
Lucky is a young cat, I think he’s 4-6 years old. If this was just a round of amoxi, he would get the pills. This is for the rest of his life. I"m not going to spend the rest of his life terrifying him. And for the record, I’m a real big fan of how easy it was, but I won’t make my final decision until after his blood work next week.
And wow about your not blind kittie. She’s so lucky she has you.
Vet techs are heros in my world, btw. They are the ones who take very young critters home and feed them every hour and then take them to work the next day and do it over and over until the critters are able to be sent to foster homes or released or adopted out.
He used some kind of awesome stuff when he had to drain an abscess on her back foot. One shot, and she fell over in less than 30 seconds. She couldn’t move at all, not even to blink for herself; they had to put stuff in her eyes so they wouldn’t dry out! That’s overkill for annual shots, though.