Adventures in amateur feline veterinary medicine (or, pilling the poor longsuffering cat)
I've tried pilling Ursa (he quickly got wise to that routine), I went back to the vet's and got Clamavox (I ended up wearing quite a lot of it), and then...I got sneaky.
- Get two soft cat treats, a small paring knife, and one of the cat's antibiotic gelcaps.
- Using the point of the paring knife, dig a small hole in one of the cat treats. Try to make sure not to cut out too much, or the treat will just crumble.
- Carefully separate the two halves of the antibiotic gelcap. Shake the extra medicine off your fingertips into the kitchen sink. (Note: trust me on this - do not perform this operation anywhere near your coffee.)
- Carefully pour some of the medicine powder from the gelcap into the hole in the treat. Pour, tamp down, pour a little more, tamp down...until the hole is filled. Do not overfill.
- Put the gelcap back together. You should still have just over half of the medicine powder still in that gelcap. Which means that you'll get to do a second round of this.
- Slice the second soft treat lenghtwise. You're going to use this to "cap" the first, now-drugged, soft treat.
- Wet the treat cap with a drop of water. This will, if all goes well and the planets are correctly aligned, form a very simple glue between the soft treats. Hopefully it will work just long enough for the cat to bolt the treat, thus getting the medicine inside of him where it can do some actual good.
- Hold the two treat-bits together for a while, letting the water-glue do its job. Don't press the two halves together. You'll just end up with a crumbly, gummy mess that the cat won't touch.
- Offer the treat to the cat. Pray that he's still in his "treat bolting" phase, and doesn't try to chew the treat.
- Watch as he bolts the treat. Good!! Okay, there's about 1/3 of his daily dose of antibiotics.
- Get two more soft treats and repeat from step 2.
- On Step 3, accidentally dump half the remaining medicine powder down the sink. (Well, at least it didn't go into your new cup of coffee.) Swear a bit; but realize: if I can get the rest of this into the cat, I can give him .25ML of the antibiotic liquid and he'll still have his full dose of meds for the day.
- When "glueing" the treat together, realize that perhaps you were a bit too enthusiastic about creating the hole in soft tream #1. Try to keep the doctored treat-sandwich from crumbling completely.
- Offer the glumped-together treatbits (with some medicine powder not-so-cunningly concealed in there somwhere) to the cat. Watch as he takes the treat and tries to chew. Sigh resignedly as treat-bits fall out of the cat's mouth.
- Pick now-untouchable treat-bits off the feeding mat and go get the liquid antibiotic.
- After administering the liquid antibiotic, change your shirt. Then give the cat a treat (totally undoctored) and put him right in front of the water dish.
- Pour yourself the last of the coffee, realize you need to make a new pot, and decide to just write the day off as "wasted".
On the positive side of things, it's sunny out, I got in a really nice long walk yesterday, and Mystery Manor coffee is *really* good. And, of course, Ursa's doing well. He's put on a little bit of weight (he was skinny before), his coat is softer, and his eyes both look fine. Yesterday after I got back from my walk I even laid down with him to take a 1-hour nap. He curled up at my side, under my arm. (Granted, I had to use soft-treat bribery to get him there...but once there, he stayed with no further prompting.)
