Wait a minute!

On Friday I call the vet to make an appointment for Sally. She’s breathing with difficulty, not eating and seems listless. I want to be told whether she has any chance of recovery. All the vets are in surgery or are completely booked. I ask if I can drop her off, have her fed and medicated and available for the next vet with a few minutes to spare.

I pick her up at 6:30. She seems marginally better. I make an appointment with her vet for the next day. I nebulize her, feed and medicate her though a tube, and drink Cuban coffee. I also seem better able to handle the feeding tube and syringe and have developed a method of nebulizing her while she’s in her carrier and I’m lying on the floor holding the nebulizer.

The tech gives me a modified cap for the tube, the vet gives me another kind of syringe, checks her insulin and expresses surprise at the number, pleasant surprise. It’s in the mid 200’s.

 He has just proposed a riddle: how does a cat get enough insulin to transform her food into usable calories, yet not be given insulin when she is not eating, because that could kill her. I ask plaintively: “Didn’t you say, no insulin is better than too much insulin?” He nods, but says nothing.

I take her home and field calls from worried friends who think I have euthanized her. She is looking dapper with an orange feeding tube sticking out of her neck.

 This morning she eats real food, three times.

And the insurance company has decided, that even though in their heart of hearts they believe I have stolen my own car and torched it, they will play my claim.  Okay, so far so good. 

Goodbye my dear Sally Cookie.

The Vet was thrilled.  Sally came through the surgery with flying colors. Three hours and every diseased tooth removed and when he turned around there she was up, perky, butting her head against the cage.

I took her home. The next day she was sniffling. I took her back. “Oh, it’s Herpes. Most cats have latent herpes and when they’re stressed it becomes active. Just give her two pumps of this and she’ll be fine.”

Two days later, she is barely breathing, making a frightening honking sound, desperate to get air.  My neighbor and I take her to the Emergency Animal Hospital. She has an upper respiratory infection. She’s in pain from her gums as well. She will not eat. For two days they fill her with antibiotics, hydrate and nebulize her to clear her air passages. I go home with pain medication and an appetite enhancer. She will not look at food. She is diabetic. She can’t have insulin unless she’s eating.

The Vet who performed the surgery calls. He wants to do anything he can to help her get well. He comes in on Monday, his day off. It seems that a suture broke in her gum and bacteria entered her body causing the infection.

He tries a cold laser treatment through her lip and also on her nose to help her to breath. I take her home. I bring her back.

He surgically fixes the broken suture.  A feeding tube is inserted. I must feed her food, small amounts, five times a day through the tube. Also two kinds of antibiotics have to be pushed into the tube with a syringe and she is to be nebulized three times a day. She doesn’t want to be nebulized. Pain medication for her gum. Insulin for her diabetes…I forgot the appetite enhancer. 

She is very small. She needed to be fitted with a small feeding tube.  It has a cap, which has to be turned counterclockwise to open or perhaps to close. It doesn’t matter because the cap is just a bit too big for the tube. I can barely get it in and out. The syringe is too big for the tube. Instead of fitting down into the tube, I have to balance it and send the watered down food through it, splashing Sally. Sally is weak. I wake up and the bed is urine soaked. She can’t quite make it to the litter box; She lies under the covers pressed against me.

On Wednesday, November 18 I leave her at home alone for a few hours while I go to the bank and do a few errands. When I come home she is up. She stands under the kitchen table, a signal that she is hungry.  I feed her a small amount of real food. I am ecstatic. Later she eats again. And then later she stops eating and her breathing passages sound clogged.

Friday morning I bring her to the vet for the day. A vet who I haven’t seen before wonders why she is taking two antibiotics. It is not a good idea to take two at once. This evening I will pick her up and take her home. Perhaps for the last time.

I’ve read about MDs who want to try everything to keep their human patients alive, past the point where it would make sense to stop, but I understand the impulse. Maybe the medicine will win against the infection.  Perhaps the Vet feels he shouldn’t have performed this surgery on such an old cat, but her mouth was so diseased…Perhaps he should have fixed the broken suture surgically sooner. Perhaps.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have made the decision to allow the surgery. A lot of sadness and regret to go around. Goodbye Sally Cookie. You were the best. 

Sally at the ER

The tooth fairy comes up empty handed.

The dental fairy comes for Sally Cookie’s teeth. They are not to be found. Sally wakes me up and asks, quite angrily for her, “Where are they?” I say the vet offered them, but I said no. They were diseased; I didn’t want to save them. Was this unsentimental of me?

She shakes her head; once again I have failed her.  “The tooth fairy was going to leave me a live mouse and a yellow parakeet under my pillow in return for the teeth. I was looking forward to it.”

“I had no idea,” I say sadly. And then I remember I have her x-rays. I rummage around in the drawer. “Will this do?” I say handing her tiny x-ray with 5 or 6 images of what looks like stalagmites, the decision will be handed down next month… I’ll let you know.

The back-story.  Last year every time I took Sally C. into to see her old vet, the vet would look in her mouth and say, “I can hardly look in there. It’s awful.” Once she invited me to take a peek. I nerved myself up and looked. Something that appeared to be an open wound was visible at the back of her mouth. But we agreed that Sal was just too fragile to go under anesthesia.

The new vet and I discussed the problem. He said she’s stage 4. I wondered, why is cat dental surgery suddenly so popular? I suspect a new and reliable source of revenue, but then I remember the inside of her mouth. 

He takes many blood tests and urine samples and pronounces her sound enough to go under. The procedure takes 3 hours and every one of her teeth.

 It’s been a week since the surgery. I am concerned. It’s so difficult for her to eat that she has lost interest in food.

I heard that in the old days when people had all their teeth removed their gums became so hard that they could eat an apple without any difficulty. Is that apocryphal? 

Other Stories of Stolen Cars

I asked people on Facebook to tell me their stolen car stories. Here they are. Thank you!

MARGO'S STORY: You pay extra for car insurance in San Francisco because no matter where you live the insurance companies know that at some point your car will be stolen. Mine was — from Russian Hill — twice. Found both times not so far away, on the street, in the Tenderloin.

The cops told me that Hondas were the easiest cars to break into, so car thieves loved to break in to keep their hand in. To deter them, my friend Gary devised a little red light on the dashboard that stayed on but was not connected to any real alarm system. The thieves were not fooled: they ripped off the car, left it in the usual place, and to show their contempt, pulled out the red light and left it on the driver’s seat.


CLARE'S STORY: Here's my story (happened to a friend of mine, name changed). Harold's car was stolen, and he was especially upset cause he was in the midst of remodeling and had a lot of tools in the trunk. Surprisingly, he got it back about 10 days later — and there were *more* tools in the trunk than were his! He came out ahead actually. Amazing.

LAURA'S STORY: I decided to go out with some friends (I was 18 at the time and that's what we did). I got home and one of my parents' two cars was gone. Knowing it was having problems, I assumed it was at the shop. When I got up in the morning, the police were at my house because the car had in fact been stolen.

Apparently, about 15 minutes before I got home, our dogs were going crazy so my step-dad sent them to the basement. They were still young dogs and he thought they were just playing. He then went back to bed.

The police officer asked if anything was missing and apparently the perpetrators took the keys to the car off the decorative key-holder in our kitchen, and also took a large, sharp, kitchen knife.

If I had come home 15 minutes earlier, I would have been met by two men, armed with a knife, intent on stealing our car. The car was later found, intact but trashed, in Englewood, NJ.

I know you were looking for short and witty, but I send you this hoping you'll count your blessings.

Stolen Car Stories

I live in Chicago where 40 cars a day are stolen.

Last week my adorable red Toyota was one of them. Stolen from the back yard parking space between 6:00 and 8:30 P.M. I know the time because when I went downstairs the next morning, my neighbor was parked in my spot.

I squinted again and again trying to turn his big dark blue Scion into my tiny red Toyota, but no luck. I walked around the block just in case I had lost my mind and misplaced my car. Nope. My neighbor’s wife walked around the block in case I had lost my mind. Nope.

Regretfully, I phoned the police. The policemen took my report and told me a dreadful story about the gang rape of a young girl in California and added: “Be glad you weren’t there when they stole the car.” Then he asked how old I was. When he realized we had grown up in the same era he said: “When we were young, people gave pregnant women their seats on the bus, the world has gone downhill and will only get worse.

Right I thought, the good old days... so great for women and blacks and gays and etc... a more civilized time indeed! But I kept decorously quiet. At the end of our amiable, somewhat bleak conversation he said: “Buy a gun”

The next day another detective called to say that after my car had been abandoned, it was set on fire and then towed to impound.

I told my stolen car story to a few friends and was surprised to find that absolutely everyone had a stolen car story. It’s a rite of passage, like having a bad time at the prom, so I thought: Let’s hear it!

If you would like to send me your stolen car story. Please do, but make it a bit shorter. I was too long-winded, but telling the story felt good and now I don’t need to ever tell it again!