Sorry for anyone who comes here regularly (yeah right:) but we’ve had a kitty crisis here at the Curmudgeon manse. Tiggr, the 3-year-old monster cat (20 pounds when the crisis began) apparently decided it would be fun last Friday night to pull all of the bobbin thread out of Mommy’s sewing machine and ingest it. This led to the thread getting wound up in his small intestine to the point where he couldn’t eliminate anything and was vomiting about once an hour. So we took him to the emergency vet on Saturday afternoon once it was clear he wasn’t trying to barf up a hairball (both cats are shedding like mad right now in preparation for growing their winter coats) and after a day and a half of observation (and Tiggr not using the litter box) they decided to give him a kitty enema. Once they did that, they discovered the thread. They couldn’t pull it out, so they had to remove it surgically. He got through that OK but now he’s running a fever, so they’re going to do some blood work to make sure it isn’t infection (it could just be due to inflammation).
Total cost at this point is running about $3600 if he has to stay another couple of nights. I actually don’t give a damn how much it costs — I want the cat to get better and come home, and if this is what it costs, so be it — but it is beginning to make me wince when I think about it. My advice to those who own cats: Get pet insurance. We didn’t, and we’re regretting it. And we damn well intend to buy it after this episode.
[Further thought: And put the sewing machine out of kitty’s reach. We would never have thought he would have pulled the bobbin thread out. But you know what they say about curiosity.]
[BTW, here are our “kids”. Tiggr is the tiger cat. Snoopy is the Turkish Van. And if those two sites aren’t enough, here’s another, and another…oh, just go Google it.]
[UPDATE 08:28 Thursday: Tiggr has been taken off the narcotic pain reliever and is on a “regular” pain reliever. The doctor says that he’s “spunky” this morning.]