Of Determination and Routines

Josie’s recovery continues well - too well, in one respect. I’ll tell you about that in a moment. After my complaints of yesterday about my Chubs refusing the food into which I had crushed her medicinal pills, some readers rightly suggested that I should have asked for liquid anti-biotic. Very true. Tucker too needs a dental procedure. His mouth is not terrible but it is worse than Josie’s was. Any surgery for the roly poly was delayed until his diabetes was stabilized. It is, so his dental will probably be scheduled for late February or March. I will be demanding a liquid medicine for him.

In the meantime, Josie is eating soft-food only. But she is suspicious of it, as it quite clearly smelled of veterinary trickery to her. I have stopped crushing up the pill in her food. As put forward by Flynn’s mum and dad, I have begun dissolving the pill in a very small amount of water, and injecting it into her mouth. I crush the pill and set its remains in the water overnight (for the morning dosage) and through the day (for the later application) so that it is as dissolved as possible. It is a bit of a struggle to give the Great White her medicine, especially as I am conscious of the tenderness of her mouth, but everything went in this morning, which is probably an improvement over the incomplete consumption when hidden in food that is not all eaten.

But Josie likes having the hard-food available for when she is peckish, and I am sure she is hungry much of the time. She can’t have any hard-food until Saturday, though she thinks otherwise. The other cats still get the hard-food when I think Josie is sleeping or too comfortable to try to steal some, so a bowl of it is kept on top of the refrigerator. Last evening, I was reading in the sitting room and heard a ruckus in the kitchen. Josie had leaped up on to the top of fridge, via the counter, which is three and a half, maybe four, feet high, and in turn two and a half or three feet below the top of the refrigerator. She was determined to have some hard-food, which her little but powerful nose obviously had smelled. She saw that I was just as determined to stop her, so she leaped still farther up, onto the top of the cabinets. I seized her, only to have her latch onto the edges of the cabinetry where it joined the wall. I managed to pry her from there and set her on the floor.

The poor cat. She doesn’t know why she is being starved. And she is receiving plenty of food. It’s just not to her liking. Because I cannot leave the hard-food down on the floor for any who want it - not until Saturday; another reason to long for the weekend - I have been coming home during my lunch-break (not as long a trip as it was when I lived in the house) and giving the beasts an extra soft-food meal. The last time I would come home early was when I would prepare the house for a viewing. I wonder if the cats think I’m selling their home from under them again…

Josie and the others are coping very well, all things considered. If they are not eating as much as they normally do, or as much as I would like, they are eating nevertheless, and come Saturday, routines will be re-established. By then, my Chubs may be just a little bit less chubby.