Well, it happened.
After an invigorating summer that recalled much younger days, our 15 year-old cat Tony suddenly stopped eating and started barfing.
The barfing was nothing new, but this time it wasn't accompanied by the usual hairball.
The barfing stopped after a day or two, but instead of perking up and going back to yowling constantly for a lap to sit on and laptop to obscure, Tony retreated to a chair and lay down, alone.
She (yes, she--my wife hadn't quite determined her sex when she named her) didn't eat much for the next few days. She also didn't get any perkier. So, on Friday, we packed her off to the vet to learn that she was wildly dehydrated and, worse, that she had "kidney failure."
Now, it turns out that, as in humans, kidney failure is not an instant death sentence. They don't do dialysis with cats, but they do hook them up to IVs and pump them full of "fluids," and the fluids perform a similar service as dialysis.
To perform cat dialysis, we soon learned, you get one of those big IV bags, hang it on a hook, and put a needle on it. Then you hold the cat on the floor, grab some of the fur on the scruff of the neck, and poke the needle in. Then you keep the cat immobilized for a few minutes until the designated amount of "fluids" have dripped in.
The fluids go in too fast to be immediately absorbed, so they drain to the bottom of the cat. So when we got home from the vet yesterday, Tony had odd-looking globules of unabsorbed fluids floating around on her belly. But, miracle of miracles, she looked fluffier than she had two hours earlier. And two hours later, the globules were gone, and she was purring and stretching again.
The Funded
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