vet visit

[cellio]

Tonight's was not one of the better trips to the vet, despite the best efforts of my vet and her assistant to make things go smoothly. (My vet and the assistant rock, and when I go back in a few weeks I should take them cookies or something.) I'm not sure what got into Erik and Baldur tonight.

We started with Baldur having a voluminous accident in the carrier on the way over, which meant we gave him a bit of a sponge bath upon arrival. (The assistant was very kind to take the carrier away and wash it. Normally I think of the "bio cleanup" fee they tack on as just skimming, but they earned it tonight.) This probably did not start things off on a good note. :-) But hey, fresh sample from an identified cat and I'd forgotten to collect a sample from the box -- it's not all bad. But Erik was also uncharacteristically jumpy tonight, including when the vet was trying to draw blood. She has never before had trouble getting a clean draw from him.

Baldur, presumably still grumpy from the bathing, growled through the entire exam. He also fidgetted a lot. When 17.75 pounds of grumpy cat decides to fidget, you notice. I thought he was going to take the vet's fingers off when she did the dental exam, and she told me to just stay away from his head while the assistant was clipping his claws because she was afraid he might bite me. (I'd already gotten scratched once.) It has been many years since I've seen him behave that badly at the vet's.

At least they both took their shots without squirming. Baldur once had a presumed allergic reaction to one of the vaccines, so he also gets a shot of kitty Benadryl.

I couldn't get three adjacent appointments, so I'll have to go back another time with Embla. I made this appointment as "Erik plus one" and that was ok with them. (The vet specifically wanted to see Erik tonight.) I'm not surprised that I was unable to capture Embla tonight.

But in interesting news, it seems the Atkins craze has cat-food analogues. I had commented that I expected Erik to have gained some weight (he didn't) because he's been getting canned cat food (to bury medicine in); the vet told me that actually, anecdotal evidence suggests that cats are more likely to lose weight on canned food. The dry stuff, by contrast, is full of carbs. Mind, this isn't scientifically-validated research; it's just what some vets have started to talk casually with each other about. Curious.

Comments

[sekhmets-song.livejournal.com]

My sister's cat has had to go through chemo treatments over the course of the last four or five months. Spinnaker (aka Spin) knows the trips will result in her being tied down, jabbed with an IV needle, and nausea for days. I cannot imagine how my sister gets her to go to the vet every two weeks, but somehow she does.
(Oh, you might want to reconsider those Feline leukemia vaccinations, unless your kitties go outside. That is what caused Spin's cancer. Even with the lumpectomy and the chemo treatments, Spin is only predicted to live for another six months. The vaccination causes this cancer in 1 out of every 1000. If your cats aren't really at risk for the leukemia, I wouldn't consider it worth facing those odds.)

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

I'm not that surprised, actually. One argument for low-carb diets in general, and some of their variants in particular, is that they're closer to what our caveman ancestors ate (B.P.F.)**. Perhaps kitties need to channel their smilodon forebears. :-)

** Before Processed Foodstuffs. :-)

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

I dunno... both the dog and the cats (when we had them) seemed to gain weight pretty quickly on wet food. Fat furballs!

[indigodove.livejournal.com]

Yow...that is a bad night at the vet's by any standards.

Hope the tests (especially for Erik) all come back good!

[moose]

The carb & cats thing has *nothing* to do with Atkins and everything to do with biology.

Cats are carnivores, mostly. They will eat some grass and plants, but mostly they live on meat. The amount of carbs in dry food is far, far more than cats "in the wild" would ever eat.

When Shade was ill her vet and I got to talking about diabetes in both cats and humans. It seems that a researcher discovered that, for *some* diabetic cats, the need for insulin disappears if they're taken off dry food. If the problem is simply that the pancreas isn't making enough insulin to keep up, removing the heavy load from the dry food sometimes is enough of a treatment.

Cats aren't really designed to breakdown carbs so it makes sense that, especially as they get older, they would gain weight from 'em.

[and remember, i'm anti-atkins :-)]