The Pets Thread

Rescued a mom and two kits that took up refuge in my shed. This is them unloading to the local shelter where they’ll find new homes. (one kit is hiding behind mom)

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My cat lays just like that sometimes (though not inside a laundry basket, just in random places about the house.

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I went out of town for a week, and apparently Manny Pearl missed me. He’s been on my desk all this week, and he follows me when I get up to pee (I’ll spare you the bathroom photo).

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Can I say I love Manny Pearl AND your cat eye glasses!

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Thank you! I really like them, even though I have graduated to bifocals (sad trombone).

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our cats get super clingy for a day or so after we’re gone for awhile, too. day and night. then they relax and are much happier when they realize the normal routine has returned.

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Manny has grown up to a cute fuzzy helper… and this is a good thing.

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Don’t feel bad. Mine are too!

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They grow up too fast. Seems like it was only a bit ago that Manny was a squee little puffball named Minnie!

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Getting a good picture of our flame-point Manx has been surprisingly difficult. Finally got one where her Siamese-ness and tailless-ness are on equal display!

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I know right? This time next year, I bet he’ll be a big ol’ dude.

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oof, those eyes… so gorgeous!

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She’s the sweetest little kitteh, too!

And to think, somebody tossed this kitten to the curb. Ferrealz. She was found at the intersection of Canton Center Road and Ford Road in Canton, MI. It’s a huge intersection, and one of the busiest in Metro Detroit. It’s a miracle someone spotted her.

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That’s horrible. But, it was the circuitous path that brought her to you, so she’s got some lucky stars! And a very pretty face :smiley:

Unrelated: There’s an emoji for non-potable water? :non-potable_water: Weird.

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I just noticed Derpasaurus is sleeping in the easy chair behind Kizmet (@CleverEmi - her luck is why we gave her this intentionally misspelled name!). :smile_cat:

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Stealth Kitteh!

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Speaking of pets … that’s a large part of why I haven’t been around here much for a while.

Our Senior Cat, Lorenzo, started eating less and less over the past several months. Near the beginning of May, we took him in for his periodic internal medicine checkup (he’s on medication for liver problems) and we’d noted he’d lost some weight. The vet suggested checking his weight at home and seeing how he does over the course of a few weeks.

A month later, he’d lost about 700 grams. An ultrasound found a mass in his abdomen, but tissue sampling was inconclusive. We weren’t quite ready to go to surgery, so the vet added some medications to his routine, we changed food, and we started keeping a very close eye on his eating habits. By July, he was down another 750 grams, was very lethargic, and it was obvious he wasn’t feeling well. We made an appointment with the vet for later in the month, but he stopped eating entirely. We took him in for an emergency visit.

The mass had not moved, but it was clearly causing him to not eat. My partner and I talked it over with each other, as well as with the vet. We did not want to put him through a surgery if he wasn’t going to recover or if it was just going to be an exercise in keeping him alive without regard to his quality of life. In the end, we went ahead with the surgery, as he was still well enough to undergo surgery, even if there was no guarantee as to what would be found once they opened him up.

The surgery went well, although it took a bit of time for him to recover enough to come home. All in all, he was in the animal hospital for 5 days total. He came home with a line of staples closing an incision from the bottom of his sternum to the bottom of his abdomen, as well as an esophageal feeding tube in the side of his neck. We’ve spent a week now feeding and medicating him through the tube and generally looking after him more or less around the clock. (We have a spreadsheet to track medications and feeding schedules. I’m so glad to have a flexible work situation and that I work from home!)

At this point, he’s still not eating on his own, but his fur is looking much better, his energy level is improving, and he seems much happier. The biopsy on the mass was negative for cancerous cells, and was probably from an irritation in the bowels, possibly from something he ate that wasn’t food! (We’ve noted that this was apparently his oyster imitation.)

Latest fun time? Yesterday evening, about 45 minutes after his evening feeding, my partner asked if I’d noticed his e-tube being so “high” on his neck. We checked him out, and found that he had pulled the tube loose, and most of it was now out of the hole in the side of his neck. Oh joy, we get to make another emergency run to the vet! They restored the tube and checked him out, adjusting some of the specifics on the medicine, and sending him home with us. Of course we have an appointment today to remove the staples, so we get to go right back up there, about 14 hours after we left late last night.

He still had one final feeding for the day once we got home. He hopped up on the futon, curled up on a pile of towels we had there (we’re going through a lot of towels in this process) and slept through the entire feeding process.

Cats, man, I tell you.

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Awww, hugs and better health for all the people and all the cats.

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I think cats, at least, like to nap on clean laundry because their scent is inexplicably missing from the fabric and they are making everything smell just like them. Also, clean laundry has a disturbing lack of cat hair, and they hate that. Everything is better with a layer of cat hair, or so Manny Pearl tells me.

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After 8 weeks of recovery, Tabitha was finally cleared by the vet of any restrictions last week. No more cage or supervision needed. Her knee surgery seems to have been a great success and I haven’t seen her limping in weeks.

Hopefully we won’t need to go through this again on her other knee. The luxating patella on her right leg was pretty low level so if we’re lucky it won’t degenerate and need intervention like it did on her left leg.

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