If you had a free round-trip ticket to anywhere, where would you go?
If the ticket covered treatment and not just travel, I’d probably get excellent value from an all-expenses-paid trip to the vet. Our credit card is sitting in a foetal position and crying at the prospect of what’s about to happen.
First, a little Hallowe’en update: despite it being the highest holy day in a black vampire cat’s calendar, Louis Catorze decided that he didn’t want to spend Hallowe’en with us boring humans. Instead, he went out to gallivant with the demons.
(Don’t worry, he didn’t go anywhere near The Front and was only allowed at The Back, where he is perfectly safe. Catorze doesn’t wander anywhere near far enough to get into any mischief at The Back. In fact, I fear far more for the other passing wildlife than for him.)
The next morning, the little sod puked on me twice: once on my white joggers and again on a hand-wash-only Tibetan wool shawl given to me by Cat Daddy’s sister. There was no hork-hork warning klaxon; in fact, each incident was more like a sudden, aggressive burp that went too far, rather than the traditional, high-drama cat puke that we all know and love.
This made us wonder if, perhaps, Catorze wasn’t quite fully healed from his pancreatitis. Our friend who visited for Hallowe’en also pointed out that Catorze’s belly, which we’d initially believed to be from his increased appetite, looked more distended than fat.
So, yesterday, we took Catorze back to the vet. The vet echoed what our friend had said, and confirmed that the podgy belly wasn’t weight gain from too much food. Poor Catorze was so bloated that she couldn’t even really examine his belly properly, and she added that his shallow breathing with his belly puffing out at the sides also wasn’t normal.
Cat Daddy and I felt absolutely awful. We were all ready to be told off for overfeeding him, but we really weren’t expecting this at all. The little sod has gone from 2.61kg to 3.3kg in the space of a month, but not in a good way, it seems.
Catorze’s blood tests ended up revealing nothing that we didn’t already know (slightly elevated kidney markers but everything else normal), so the next step is to take him for an X-ray and scan. We hope that these will give us some answers.
Please take your furry overlords to the vet if anything like this happens to them. Take it from us: if they chub up, they’re supposed to do it a little bit all over, not just in one place on the body. We know this now, and we won’t be making this mistake again.
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
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