Still, pet problems

Yep I’m still ill. This morning I was coughing, sneezing and blowing my nose non-stop. I am going to the gym today for the first time in over a week and try to burn this shit out of me. Going to do an hour of hard cardio.

Last night was unpleasant. Shortly after we got home, I was working on my computer and looked over at Buttons, the diabetic cat. She was meowing loudly and looked like she was getting ready to heave like she does on a psuedo-regular basis. I told Ali and she came in with a paper towel trying to catch the mess. Well after a bit it became obvious ther was something else going on. The cat’s toungue was hanging out of her mouth and she was panting at an unbelieveably fast rate. She was sort of staggering around as well. The Ali yells, SHE’s PEEING! Oh great. I didn’t know what was going on, if she was having a stroke, a heart attack, or a seizure. I scooped her into a box and took her out on the lanai. I let her out and she continued staggering, panting, meowing and then she dropped a number 2 as well. Ali called the emergency animal hospital and of course they advise we bring her in as fast as possible. It was decided I would be the one to take her since I would be the more reasonable one if it came down to some sort of decision on the cat’s well being. This place is open from 5pm to 8am every night, weird but tailored to these types of situatons and as I later found out, custom tailored to try to financially rape anyone that needs their services.

The first thing when I got in the door I had to fill out a form and agree to a 69 dollar charge regardless of what action was necessary. They took her back and came out shortly afterward saying her blood sugar was very low, and this was a hypo-glycemic reaction. This has never happened before so I was surprised to hear this. The Vet outlined a treatment plan which I said was fine and then she said she would prepare an estimate and send it out. One of the assistants presented me with the estimate, it had a low and high end number. The low end was 335 bucks and the high end was over 500. Woah! I immediately expressed my surprise and concern over this huge number and told her I needed to call my wife. This is why I went, because Ali would have just rubber stamped any treatment plan without regard to the cost, it’s just her way.

I went back in and asked to talk to the vet to go over the “estimate” When she came out I expressed my concern over the high costs we were being quoted and began to go over the estimate line by line. Included were a number of diagnostic tests that may have been helpful however they were unnecessary to stabilize the cat. I explained that in the past we have dropped big bucks on her condition when she was first diagnosed and there was a financial line that I did not want to cross. The cat is over 10 years old, has bad teeth, and has puking issues so I am not going to throw a fortune into treatment. She is getting to be an old cat and the diabetes acclerates this. We agreed upon a slimmed down plan that still cost me over 200 bucks. I just really hate how operations like that seem to take advantage of you because they know you have few options.

We picked the cat up this morning. She seemed better. We are taking her to our normal vet today to get a workup to see if we need to adjust her insulin level. Apparently what happened yesterday was because for some reason the cat ate very little yesterday and as a result, the insulin pulled her blood sugar level way down, causing the reaction. It will be interesting to see what the revised plan is. I had such a headache when I got home last night, hopefully the news is good. I’m just not willing to go to extremes to maintain our cats at this point. They are both getting up there and when it is their time, I am willing to let them go.