excellent!!! i’m doing a happy dance with nod the naughty in celebration with you.
Hm - sounds kind of like the way we hold ours when they get a B-A-T-H. I’m glad it works, but beware - they get wise to these things, and find new ways to struggle. It took two people and a good 20 minutes to get Rhodium’s antibiotics into her for her URI.
Hooray on him eating on his own! I betcha he’s acting like nothing ever happened tomorrow, except that he’ll be begging for more of all that special food he’s been offered.
We had a trip to the emergency vet with Cobalt at around that age, or maybe a tiny bit older. One evening, he started limping badly, holding one front paw in the air. He was obviously miserable, too - he was sleeping in the litterbox, and dragging slowly around the house. Of course, he develops these symptoms at 8pm, so his regular vet is closed. So we bundled him into a carrier and headed off to the emergency vet. They did an X-ray and couldn’t see that any bone was broken - they told us that he had probably sprained it, and that we should keep him from jumping for a few weeks. Right. So we coughed up our $400 or so for the visit, and shut him in the bathroom, because it had the fewest things to leap on in the house.
The next morning, we went in the bathroom, and he’s obviously still miserable, but he’s holding the other front paw in the air. Hm. Back to the regular vet this time, who diagnoses him with calicivirus, basically kitty flu. Their muscles get sore, just like humans with the flu, and they favor whichever extremity aches the most at any given moment.
So we headed home again with our sick boy and some antibiotics. Two days later, he was tearing around the house as usual - absolutely no sign that anything had ever been wrong with him. Rhodium never caught it, as far as we could see. They really bounce back fast. This is also one reason why a lot of shelters are doing early spay/neuter now - the kittens are up and about really fast compared to adult cats.