pet insurance

So, after our recent jaunt down the road towards bankruptcy because of our sick kitty, Brandon and I are considering pet insurance.

I'm wondering if any of you guys have any experience with pet insurance or access to any inside information (Allison? Kris?) about which is best, which have good or bad reputations, etc.

Please share if you have had ANY experience with pet insurance, because we are totally new at this. We don't even know if she would be eligible, as she now has a diagnosed chronic condition (IBD), but it seems like something we should think about, considering the outlay we have already made to get her well again.

CLEO IS HOME!!!!!!

She's eating like a wee little horse and drinking like a camel and pissed off at us when we have to give her her meds, of which there are about thirty-five, but SHE'S HOME!

two good milestones

First of all, thank you to everyone who has been sending positive thoughts to us for our Cleopatra. It means an awful lot to us, because it's been a rough two weeks not knowing WHAT to expect.

She is doing better. She hasn't had any vommiting in 36 hours, and she has been eating on her own. The doctor is switching her to oral medication today, and if she can keep that down and continues to eat normally, she should be able to come home soon. So keep your fingers crossed!

Second, this is post number 500 on this blog! WOW! Thanks for reading, guys.

duck and potato

The saga of the sick kitty continues. Yesterday we took Cleo back to the hospital because she had started vomiting again and wasn't eating or drinking. We knew it was serious when, rather than being her crazy, hellacious public self, she was docile and quiet. When we weighed her, she came in at 7.6 pounds -- TWO POUNDS lighter than only a week ago.

Not good.

According to the docs, it was probably the inflammatory bowel disease flaring up again. They got her on IV fluids and gave her some prednizone and when we visited her yesterday, we actually coaxed her to eat a little.

Apparently she is eating and drinking well today, and we will be able to take her home, although we now get to add a steroid to her medication schedule and buy her fancy, expensive, hypo-allergenic "duck and potato" cat food.

She's going to be eating better than we do!

I have never been this excited about cat poop before

Cleo is home and doing well. She gets three kinds of medicine, twice a day -- a process she does not enjoy in the least. But she is eating on her own, and today, she pooped!

Yay!

=P

According to the Vet, she may have some sort of irritable bowel, which may have been what was causing her kidney to be inflamed, but the good news is that the biopsies did not show anything horrible -- like cancer,m or dead kidney tissue, or anything like that.

She goes back on Friday to have her sutures removed, and then hopefully we can remove the cone. She's not a big fan of the cone any more than she is a fan of us shoving pills down her throat.

We keep telling her it's for her own good, but I don't think she believes us.

Cleo came home today. We have three medicines, baby food, boiled chicken and rice, and a very tired kitty who is currently sleeping under my desk.

We still don't know the results of the biopsies, but she's home. So I don't really care right now. :>

this blog is just full of fun faluppa

I really, REALLY like the word "frippery."

frip·per·y (frĭp'ə-rē)
n., pl. -ies.

1. Pretentious, showy finery.
2. Pretentious elegance; ostentation.
3. Something trivial or nonessential.

[French friperie, from Old French freperie, old clothes, from felpe, frepe, from Medieval Latin faluppa, worthless material.]

kitty update

Cleo came through surgery fine. They did not find any foreign bodies in her intestines, which is a very very good thing. They took "a bunch" of biopsies of her kidney and, I expect, her intestines to see what's going on with the kidney and make sure nothing else is wrong. Unfortunately, since they had to check out the intestines to make sure nothing was in there, she has a "zipper incision," which I'm assuming means that it's about three or four inches long. That's pretty big for a 10 pound kitty.

They told us that she was hissing and fighting pretty good when she came out of the anesthesia yesterday, but that now she's curled up in the back of her cage. She's still on an IV, so she hasn't eaten anything on her own yet, but they will try to give her some food later today. They're going to keep her until at least tomorrow, and we won't know the results of the biopsies for three or four days.

She's on antibiotics and pain killers and she'll have to wear a cone for a while. I'm sure she just loves that.

We're going to go visit her tonight, although I'm not entirely sure that she will be happy to see us. The doctors suggested we bring some food and maybe a toy -- something familiar.

My poor baby. =(

cleo

Our kitty, Cleopatra, is in the hospital.

On Saturday, she threw up some tin foil and a piece of red thread, and we didn't think much of it. She was acting normally, and she's forever eating weird stuff off the floor or the sofa cushions or whatever, and she threw it up, which is much better than keeping it down.

But by Monday morning, it seemed to me that she ought to be yowling at me to fill up her food dish, only, it was still half full, exactly as it had been all weekend. She wasn't acting strangely, so I gave her a couple of treats to see if she would eat them. She wolfed them down and promptly threw them up again about 20 minutes later.

Now I was worried.

I called Allison, who works as a veterinary assistant, and she talked to her Dr. and they thought I should take Cleo to the vet. So, I did, and I left her there for them to do x-rays and blood work.

When they called at around 5:00 and told us that the doctor wanted us to come in so that he could speak with us, I knew it wasn't good.

What everyone was worried about was that there might be more string in her intestines, but they couldn't really tell from the x-ray. What they could tell is that her right kidney is enlarged and has a lot of white spots in it. Could be kidney stones, could be calcium deposits, could be something else. Her blood work wasn't good either. The first doctor kept saying "kidney failure," which didn't go over well with us.

So, we were told to take her to a 24 hour animal hospital, which we did. Now, what you have to understand about Cleo is that she is the sweetest, most lovable kitty in the world when we're at home. She cuddles. I have NEVER met a cat who cuddles as much as she does. She's just amazingly sweet and lovie. This is NOT the case when she goes to the vet. She transforms into the hell beast of doom, hissing, growling, swatting and biting at anything that moves, including us, so she has to be sedated for even the most routine procedures so that the vets and vet techs keep all their limbs intact.

The hospital doctor decided that the best thing to do would be to keep her overnight, get some fluids in her and some antibiotics, and see if her bad kindey levels went down. They didn't. When we called this morning, he recommended that they do exploratory surgery; since she would have to be sedated for any procedure, he figured they might as well do the one that would tell them the most about what was going on. They were going to check out her intestines for damage, and also biopsy her kidney to try to find out what was going on with that.

That was at 9:00 this morning. We haven't heard since.

I forced myself to wait until noon to call the hospital, but the kind receptionist said that the doctors were unavailable and would have to call me back.

I'm worried, and I want my baby back. Brandon and I aren't taking it too well, really. He's such a goober. When I first told him it was going to be around $500 for the x-rays and stuff at the first hospital, he said, "For $25 we could get a whole new cat," but when he saw her when we moved her from one place to the other, he was all kinds of worried. We just miss her and want her home and well.

Is that too much to ask?

i feel very american

I'm making cherry cobbler for the church picnic tomorrow because the theme of the picnic is ethnic food, and we're supposed to bring something from our ethnicity.

I figured "Southern" was about as close to an ethnicity as I really get, so cobbler it is, cos I don't make fried chicken or fried okra, and nobody but me would eat turnip greens if I made those.

i see rude people...

I hate rudeness.

I am thinking of two specific incidences that have incensed me and stuck with me after the actual event.

First, our next door neighbor has a very bad habit of being inordinately loud. Our walls are thick enough that it doesn't matter when she's in her own apartment, but unfortunately, she's a smoker and so she spends a lot of time out on her patio, which is RIGHT next to our bedroom window.

Now, it's already a little annoying that she goes out on her patio to smoke, because this is Southern California, and we LIVE with our windows open. This means that we get to enjoy her second hand smoke unless we get up and close the windows and doors in time. But it's her patio, her apartment, her life. Right?

Wrong. At least, wrong when she comes home at 11:30 or 12 o'clock at night and is drunk and SHRIEKING at the top of her lungs with her friends. It used to be a rare occurrence. The first year we lived here, she was going through some sort of bad break up and would have screaming profanity-peppered phone calls with her boyfriend at 2am. Now she just comes home drunk with friends and sits out on the patio and talks REALLY loud. So loud, in fact, that even if we get up and close our window, we can still hear her.

This happened on Thursday night, and I lay there FUMING about it for nearly an hour after she woke us up. I was plotting how I would write a nasty anonymous note and leave it pinned to her door, or how I would wake up REALLY early on the weekend and bang pots and pans outside her bedroom window, or how I would get up and go shout at her for waking us up.

None of which I did, of course.

Her patio is RIGHT next to our window. She cannot help but notice this. She also cannot help but notice that it is NIGHT, generally a WEEKNIGHT and that the rest of the apartment complex is quiet. Maybe it's just because she's drunk, but how can she think that's OK? There are certain rules of etiquette that people should obey when living in such close quarters with other people. And being quiet and courteous at night should definitely be one of them.

The second thing that happened took place this morning.

Brandon and I were walking in the mall near our house after going to the French cafe for breakfast, when I heard my name called. A friend I hadn't seen in a while came over. We exchanged pleasantries, when suddenly she turned to my husband, reached for his stomach, and said, "Well I can see she's feeding you! You're not thin!"

In exactly those words.

I was horrified! How could anyone say that? That is the most ridiculously rude thing I can think of. Didn't her parents teach her that it is impolite to make personal comments? On what planet is that sort of thing acceptable?

It's not even as though she was just ribbing a friend; she has only met my husband on a few social occasions. They aren't buddies, and they certainly don't have the sort of relationship where she might conceivably think it was OK to tease him about his weight.

I realize that I may be more sensitive to weight issues than most people, but that is just plain rude.

When did that become OK? How do people get along in this world without some basic understanding of politeness and decency? Doesn't anyone care about anyone but themselves any more?

Is this yet another symptom of living in the Land of Fruits and Nuts (TM), or is it this bad all over?

I swear: if I have children, they are going to grow up understanding the importance of being polite to the people around them. I refuse to contribute to this growing apathy towards the social niceties.