Hearts Walking Around

“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”  Elizabeth Stone


Yes, this quote is supposed to be referencing parents of human children.  But when you have the kind of week I've had, it's hard not to believe that the same thing is true for those of us whose "children" are four-footed, too.  


I was away at a conference this week, and called home on Tuesday to speak with what turned out to be a very dejected Sean.  


"How's it going?"  I asked.


"Okay, I guess."  Sean said.  


"What's going on?  You don't sound so good." 


Turned out that Otto had been sick.  A lot.  He'd thrown up a bunch, stopped eating, and then started throwing up water.  He'd been lumping continuously, completely unresponsive to any attempt Sean made to cheer him up.  


Something was bad wrong with Otto.  It's not like him to ignore food.  Especially mush, which is a priority for him in almost every situation.  Sean had already taken him to the vet and was waiting on pins and needles to get the results of the blood work and urinalysis.  


After agonizing hours, the vet called back to say that Otto had a run-of-the-mill kidney infection.  His BUN levels were elevated, but the other two markers that point to kidney failure were low, coupled with a urinalysis, which said infection.  Dr. McKisson administered an antibiotic injection and a bunch of sub-cutaneous fluids and pronounced that Otto should be feeling much better by the next day.  Immense relief from my end, and cautious optimism from Sean's.


Except, the next day, Otto wasn't really any better.  Still lumping.  Still vomiting.  Still anorexic.  I rushed to get home as fast as I could, taking Dr. Kevin's suggestion of trying to feed him some turkey baby food.  Bought four jars of it and motored home.  Sean had barely eaten all day.  Nervous stomach made food seem unimportant.  I skipped lunch and opted instead to pause briefly at a rest-stop to get a pack of crackers and get back on the road as quickly a possible.


Proceeded to try to force-feed a very willful Siamese cat some baby food.  Let me just tell you, it wasn't pretty.  Otto kind of looked like that baby in the posters from the seventies--the one with spaghetti all over his head.  Although in Otto's case, his spaghetti was reconstituted turkey.  He had it everywhere--his chest, his cheeks, his paws.  Otto didn't care.  All that mattered was that at all costs he kept the dreaded food from passing his thin grey lips.  


Here's the thing:  with cats, if they go too long without eating, they get something called hepatic lipidosis.  To put that in layman's terms, once they stop eating, they get to a point where they essentially can't eat anymore.  And then they die.  Needless to say, we were taking this anorexia piece very, very seriously.  I took tiny pieces of food and kept forcing them into his mouth.  And then taking the little pieces that came out and putting them back in again.  Yes, it was probably goal-tending, but it was getting the job done.  All in all, he was getting something like a teaspoon of food per feeding.


Every two hours, we woke Otto up and forced more baby food past his unwilling incisors, until 1:00am, when I crashed, and hoped for the best.


This morning, to my delight, Otto woke up, walked into the library and sat there for a second.  I walked up to him and asked him, "Otto, do you want some foodie?"  Otto responded with an enthusiastic "mrrrrrooww!' then proceeded to eat about a teaspoon of food without any assistance at all.  Then he jumped up on the bed and purred contentedly next to Sean's head--the first time we'd heard his motor in days.


Thank goodness, our Otto is back.