Amidst all the sadness of having older kitties who are in decline and passing, we have so many fun, energetic, silly moments, most of them compliments of Zelda and Cooper.
Zelda, bless her heart, is not all that in to mush. She likes it as a social concept, and seems to get excited when the song is sung, but by and large, she always seems vaguely disappointed when the saucer is placed on the ground. "What?" she seems to be saying. "No vanilla ice cream?!" As a result, we've discovered that one way to get Zelda to eat at least a little of her foodie is to press her "butt button." Actually, it's really more about scratching her butt button. That little spot just north of their tails on their back, where most cats will raise their rumps in the air if you scratch it? That same spot "primes" Zelda for her foodie. We scratch her butt button with the plate in front of her, and the longer you scratch it, the closer she dips her head to the foodie, until finally she's nom-nom-nomming at her plate.
Ah, the things we do for love.
Contrast that to Cooper and his allergy drops. I may have neglected to post five or six months ago that Cooper was diagnosed with asthma. It was a pretty scary time, actually. One day he jumped on my lap and his breathing didn't seem quite...right. It was faster than usual, and his body was moving as he breathed. We made an appointment for the same day, and x-rays confirmed what I feared: my baby had asthma.
We gave him a steroid shot and waited for it to take effect. Unfortunately, the steroid shot itself was not without its own issues. His mood, for example, which got unexpectedly surly. And the fact that he suddenly started hiding under the bed. It was a classic case of the cure being almost worse than the disease, but at least it did get his breathing back to normal.
The vet was unable to predict if this would be a one-time event or a chronic one. That question was answered about a month and a half later when the same thing happened again. I was starting to get a little panicked at that point. We had to give him another steroid, and he reacted even worse to it that time. This was clearly not a sustainable solution. We tried to give him naturopathic options, but he didn't like them and turned it into a game of hide-and-seek.
We got him tested for allergies too, at the suggestion of the vet, and found out about that time that he was highly allergic to dust mites and box mites. After I got over being offended at the idea that we might have dust in our house (okay, I really didn't get offended--housekeeping is not my strong suit), we had to make a decision about how to resolve the allergy issues. We decided to go the long-term route of desensitization rather than the short-term route of allergy meds. The desensitization route meant that he had specially formulated medicine made for him that included trace amounts of the things he was allergic to. That meant two other choices: daily drops or weekly shots. Unfortunately, we'd have to administer the shots ourselves. After much deliberation, we decided to go with the shots since we figured it might not create an adversarial relationship if Cooper never really knew when it was going to happen, and Sean, poor guy, drew the unlucky short-straw to give them to him.
This plan worked for a while. Cooper is such a little love-muffin that he didn't seem to mind so much having us practically sit on him to keep him still while the shot was administered under his skin. Until the one time that Sean accidentally hit a nerve or something. Cooper yelped, Sean stopped, and that was the end of giving Cooper his shots.
So then we started the drops. Instead of once every four to seven days, the drops had to be administered daily--twice a day actually. At first, we dreaded this. If the naturopathic stuff wasn't going well on a once-a-day basis, then how awful was it going to be to have to track him down morning and night to give these drop thingies?
Then we discovered something kind of amazing: Cooper actually seemed to like the drops. We don't know if it's the taste, or that we allow him into the kitchen (normally an off-limits place) for those few minutes, or if it's just that he likes the extra attention. But Cooper likes his drops so much that he will come into the kitchen and wait for us to give them to him. He runs in, flops on the floor, and then when you get the drops out of the fridge, he rolls over so he's upright in front just as nicely as you please and kind of squints his eyes happily as we squeeze two drops over the side of his teeth under his tongue. He smacks his lips afterward as if it's the best treat he's ever had. I thought at first we would need to give him a shaky treat after every administration of the drops so he would have a positive association with them and want to take them, but he seems to see the drops as their own reward. He literally will not let you forget that he needs to get them.
Now all we do is say to him, "Is it time for Coopie-Drops?" He stops whatever he's doing and goes running into the kitchen. Or, if we deliver them to him on the porch, he'll come out from whatever corner he's watching bugs or lizards or birds from and sit still for drops. It must be a pretty big deal to him if he can be pulled away from lizards and birds.
The drops are the kind of thing that may actually cure him of his allergies. In other words, there may come a time when he no longer needs the drops. We might even be able to go out of town for longer than a night to visit someplace farther away than a few hours and leave our buddies with a pet-sitter.
Something tells me we will have to keep giving them to him anyway. I think he'll be disappointed if we don't.
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