We Are Sending Our Vet's Kids To College

Due to the tremendous amount of time the human has been spending tending to the needs of her husband and human and animal friends, she hasn't been able to assist me with my blog.  However, Holly appears to be on the road to heartworm recovery, the husband's shoulder is repairing itself, and I survived the horror of being shoved in a cat carrier and getting drugged at the vet where they yanked out my teeth and stuck something plastic up my butt!  Not to mention getting stabbed with needles and being told that I weigh 13 pounds.  I swore I would NEVER AGAIN be thrust into the carrier, but darn if she didn't do it a week later.  And I got another shot, horror of horrors!!!  (Note from the human: we decided that in order to keep all my fingers we wouldn't attempt to give Poonie antibiotics in pill form, so the shot he received was a whopping dose of germkiller juice).

OK.  Now on to the silliness that is Boogie.  Guess what she thought she was going to be for Halloween?

A PENGUIN!  How pathetic is THAT?!

Yes, yes, yes.  He has great big yellow eyes.  So what?

This is Holly on drugs.  You can't simply tell a Chihuahua to calm down when they're on heartworm treatment--even when she actually had a near-death experience she didn't learn from it so the vet put her on downers.  And would you look at that belly?  This dog needs a girdle, stat!

As you can see, I was NOT a happy camper when I came home from the vet.  This is me, under the bed in the guest room. 

I'm ok now and back to ruling the roost around here.  Don't I look imperious?  Am I not THE most handsome, most wonderful cat in the whole wide world?  Thank you, I KNEW you'd agree!

Squashy Face Lands In A Minefield

I know you've all been waiting anxiously to hear about my recovery, and I'm happy to say I've never been better.  Apparently having your teeth cleaned and two teeth pulled does more than eliminate bad breath--I can now actually chew my food and digest it properly!  I haven't hurled since I got home from that hellhole of a vet's office (of course, there's a downside: she can leave me alone now and believe I won't be leaving little surprises all over the floor.  Guess she hasn't heard of "paw down the throat"--can't have her thinking she can just take off WHENEVER).

I felt sure that Boo would get a major beating when she found him sitting in the middle of the pool table, surrounded by various breakable and rare items, but instead, SHE TAKES HIS PICTURE!  Jeez, this little s**thead is untouchable!  I mean, that's part of a rare pair of California pottery Indonesian dancer figurines and part of her damn precious stickpin collection. 

Yup, for sure, the paw goes down my throat the very next time she leaves the house. 

Poonie Goes To The Vet

(This post is by Poonie's human due to his, um, somewhat incapacitated state).

This is what happens when you hiss and growl at the vet.

Note: not only are Poonie's eyes glazed and his tongue hanging out of his head, but he is BEING HELD by the vet tech.  NO ONE holds Poonie.

Drugs are good (well, at least in his case).

The Geese Next Door . . . R.I.P.

Coyotes got 'em. 

OK, What's With This Dog Getting All The Attention On MY Blog???

What's the freaking deal, folks?  Here I have this blog dedicated to the Most Wonderful Cat in the World and all you can talk about is this big fat worm-ridden DOG?! 

So apparently no one knows (or cares) that "she" left me alone again, but I managed to throw up seven times while she was gone.  She had even gone to the trouble of crushing up a huge bowl of Iams, but I showed HER!

In my anguish over being ignored I have even tried to be extra-sweet--I just came into her office where she's sitting at the computer and STOOD UP AND PUT MY PAWS UP ON HER LEG.  This is MAJOR for me, everyone, just MAJOR!  And what happens?  She says, "Poonie, I know you're just doing that to get some food," and pushes me down. 

If I had claws, they'd be sunk deep into her thunder thighs as we speak. 

Begrudgingly, I must say that Holly is doing better after the blood clot incident, so much better that she was taken to an art festival yesterday where she rode around in a baby stroller and charmed the pants off everyone who saw her.  Had it been me in that stroller, of course, I would have hissed and growled at all those horrible little children who kept saying things like, "Look Mommy, it's a baby doggie in da stwohla" and "Daddy, can I pet the puppy, pweese?" 

I heard through the grapevine, however, that one of the reasons Holly was so agreeable to all that disgusting attention was because she was completely zoned out on doggie Oxycodone or Oxycontin or something.  I'm sure you could have set off an atomic bomb under her buggy and she would have gone, "Oh.  Was that an atomic bomb?  Far out."

Anyway, she's getting better and the vet says the first couple weeks of the treatment are the worst sooooo hopefully we'll be getting back to MY fascinating exploits soon.

Why I Haven't Been Blogging

I took Holly with me when I went out of town last Sunday and as usual she wouldn't eat her regular dog food so I was giving her scraps of whatever I was eating plus wrapping her antibiotics in lunch meat and by early Wednesday a.m. she was barfing all over the hotel room. We got home Wednesday mid-day and were both resting on my bed when I felt this thump--I thought the cat had jumped up on the bed so looked down and saw very quickly that he wasn't there but that Holly was laying very very very still. Like dead still.  I just came unglued--she was totally unresponsive to my yelling and shaking and hysterical crying--her eyes were open, she didn't appear to be breathing and I was screaming her name and it was absolutely horrible. Then after what seemed like an eternity I saw her breathing shallowly and her eyes started to focus slightly. I bundled her up in a blanket--and then saw she'd peed the bed, the blanket and subsequently, me--and raced to the vet. By the time the vet saw her she was pretty much back to normal, but after doing some blood tests and eliminating a seizure from either low blood sugar (the vomiting) or pancreatitis, he figured she'd passed a blood clot due to the heartworms. He gave her a shot of heparin, told me to buy her some coated aspirin and suggested I stop the antibiotics since she'd stopped the coughing.


The next day she starts back to coughing so I restarted the pills. He wanted to see her last night so we went down there at 8pm (he'd been off that day but came in to see her--he's a super great vet BTW) and gave her a few EXTREMELY LOW DOSAGE dog equivalent of Oxycontin to help with the bronchitis pain and help keep her calm. My dog, the pill popper.

This heartworm thing is just scaring me to death.  I kept screaming at her, "I'M NOT READY FOR YOU TO DIE, HOLLY!" but unfortunately that's just going to happen one of these days. The vet did say that dying from a blood clot isn't a bad way to go since you basically just boom, stop breathing.

Holly's Doing Great So Far, and Poonie's An A-hole

I think our small but mighty band of "fans" are aware of this, but so far Holly is doing well with the heartworm medication--the vet said the meds are in the process of killing the little buggers, then they start floating around her bloodstream and eventually get excreted or something (eww).  Since they're in the bloodstream, that's why the animal shouldn't get excited--their heart starts pumping faster and the heartworm corpses could bunch up and cause a clot.

So of course it's pointless to say to her, "Holly, mellow out RIGHT NOW or you're going to die!"

That obviously translates to "OK, Holly, show me how fast you can twirl!"  So she starts twirling and I'm yelling at her to stop and Boogie thinks SHE'S being yelled at so she pees all over the kitchen floor, Poonie decides it's time to throw up, and Boo just looks at everyone and thinks, "What a bunch of morons.  I need a snack.  Mom, get me a snack."

Poonie's fur is getting so matted since he's decided in his old age that he doesn't need to groom himself any longer, going for the "let it be" look as it were.  Today I decided that I'd try to brush him.  WHAT A JOKE!  Thank god no one was filming me--I'm crouched down and scuttling through the house behind the damn cat who refused to let me touch him with the brush and occasionally turns around, hisses, growls and takes a swipe at the brush.  I think that's pretty funny since he has no claws, right up until he takes a bite out of my hand.  Claws, no.  Teeth, ohhhhh yeah.

Well, he's in for it.  Next week I'm going to throw a towel over him, grab his dirty hide and throw him in a cat carrier.  Then I'm going to dump him off at the vet and let THEM deal with him.

He will undoubtedly be traumatized for the rest of his life.  Eh.