wickedqueen.net

Her name is Isabeau. “Izzy” for short; “Dove Isabeau” for long; “the foulest beast in Christendom” for longest. It’s from a folk song (naturally).

Already she has improved my life by immediately developing an upper respiratory infection upon her departure from the Humane Society, resulting in two days of not eating and concomitant frantic worry and attempts on my part to get her to EAT SOMETHING, followed by a Monday trip to the vet that ran upwards of $50 for a penicillin injection and instructions/equipment for syringe-feeding. She’s already eating a little on her own now, and is a total crazed ball of energy again. For my part, I now remember why I don’t actually want a human infant any time in the immediate future. Win-win.

As you can see, she a) has giant ears like a bat and b) enjoys sitting on my shoulder/back during those rare moments when she is not break-dancing in mid-air for a mouse on a string.

She also likes the cat tower.

She did sleep under my desk for a little bit, but it was while she was starving and not in top form.

For the most part, she is in isolation in the bathroom; I put Bart and Dora in the bedroom to let her out to play. I was planning a slow introduction anyway, but now that she’s got hideously contagious cat flu it will have to be even slower. On the plus side (for Bart and Dora), I feel bad enough about disrupting their lives that I am constantly plying them with treats, including special hoity-toity grain-free wet cat food in various flavors that include 100% quail. I know; it’s a little embarrassing.

I’m so glad ONE of the cats takes full advantage of the eight-foot kitty condo.

In other news, we went to our new vet today and Loxley tried to bite the vet. It turns out he’s not an aggressive biter… unless you’re trying to give him a shot. Not terribly surprising, in retrospect. The vet took it well. Also he does not have intestinal parasites.

Bart, on the other hand, got a shot of steroids and a trial bag of hypoallergenic food, because there were no demodex mites or other parasites in his stool, either, and yet he continues to chew off all his fur and a non-trivial percentage of his skin. I’m almost hoping it turns out he has some kind of airborne allergen reaction instead, because they can desensitize them for that and even with the initial expense of testing, it’s probably cheaper in the long run that 10+ years’ worth of hypoallergenic cat chow…

How to make tedious gruntwork for your job seem important and almost appealing: know that when you stop doing the tedious gruntwork, you will have to spray three cats with pesticide, hold them down, and rub it into their fur.

No one in this household is brimming over with cheer at the moment.

I gave all three cats their medicine today. I just used the eyedropper; Pandora is a champion at spitting up pills no matter what you do, but it’s hard to spit up a liquid.

Only 59 days to go.

The vet also thinks I should use the Frontline spray on them. Great. Nothing beats spraying unhappy cats with pesticide!

So Bart has been showing symptoms of mite infestation yet again–clearly the flea and tick spray is not sufficient to kill the things, and so when I treated him with internal medication and got rid of them last year, he just got reinfected eventually by the other two cats, who only got the spray (the other two cats do not show any symptoms; Bart is apparently unusually susceptible to Demodex).

The vet’s solution is about what you’d expect: more internal medication, for all three cats this time. Pandora is going to bite off my hands. The vet suggested mixing it with wet food for her, but that has never worked in the past; she turns up her nose at doctored vittles. I would almost rather just treat Bart once or twice a year for the rest of his life, but probably the vet would look askance at me. So we’re giving it a try.

They don’t appreciate the things you do for them. They bite you when you are trying to sleep. They whine that you are starving them and occasionally barf for no reason, or sometimes for revenge. And yet, here I am, attempting once again to make their lives better at great personal cost to myself. Well, mostly just Bart’s life. The other two are perfectly happy as asymptomatic mite carriers. Maybe I should look into getting Bart some kind of immunity bubble instead.

Okay, so my veterinary woes are nothing compared to Gwen’s problems, but they’re still annoying.

To recap: last year, when I got Legba, he infected the household with a relatively new strain of feline Demodex mites that the veterinary community didn’t even agree EXISTED this far north until the University of Wisconsin Veterinary Teaching Hospital’s dermatology department started diagnosing cases left and right–and lucky for me (kind of) that they did, because it’s such an uncommon problem and so difficult to detect, because they groom the mites off their hair so efficiently, that most places probably wouldn’t have.

Anyway, the determatology department was very excited; they took samples off of all my cats and photographed Bart, the only one who actually manifested symptoms, for a journal article or something. They trimmed all the cats’ nails gratis and sold me a big bottle of lime sulfur solution with which I had to bathe all three cats weekly for two months, lest the other two reinfect Bart.

This was very unpleasant, but it seemed to solve the problem. Bart’s fur grew back and he stopped licking big scabby places on his stomach.

Then, this past August, he started to look a little patchy again. By September–conveniently after we had already had our annual vet visit–he was back to looking like a hobo, with scabs everywhere and big chunks of fur lying all around the house. So we went back to the vet.

They couldn’t find any sign of the mites in the fecal sample I provided, but it’s hard to say for sure if it actually came from Bart, and all the symptoms were exactly the same, so we assumed that it was demodex again, coming out of a 10-month dormancy. It turns out that they didn’t really know what the hell they were doing with the lime sulfur, anyway; it just seemed like something that might kill things in general, I guess.

They’re still not really sure if their treatments are that effective, but this time they prescribed ivermectin, a liquid heartworm medication labeled for cattle, to be given daily to Bart for the next two months, and Frontline flea & tick spray to be applied to all three cats weekly for an unspecified period of time. Heartworm meds are how they treat canine demodex, which is better understood, although my vet remarked that feline demodex live further up the hair shaft, which might make it less effective. Anyway, the cattle stuff is at least cheap.

So I’ve been spraying them, and giving Bart the ivermectin, and he actually is looking a lot less scabby, although he is still patchy–it will take time for the fur to grow back in, I guess.

Legba, however, is now once again suffering from the cystic acne on his chin that was originally diagnosed in August, and for which I had to give him a three-week course of antibiotics and wash his chin every day.

I happened to catch my vet when I stopped by the vet school today to get more Frontline spray and special dental kibble (Pandora has bad teeth, and apparently Bart is developing plaque now, too), and she wrote me another prescription, so we will be doing ANOTHER three-week course of antibiotics, and more chin-washing, I guess.

It turns out that when she told me to change their bowls from plastic to metal and wash his chin and stuff, she failed to mention that whatever I did, it would probably recur anyway, because that’s what cystic acne DOES. And yes, probably I DO need to wash his little face EVERY DAY FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE to have any hope of preventing it. And even then it might recur.

Then she admitted that she had a cat with cystic acne and after awhile, she decided that “it didn’t seem to bother him” and just stopped worrying about it. She said he only oozed on stuff occasionally. Frankly, I think this may be the avenue we pursue if the problem recurs after this second course of antibiotics. Cystic acne LOOKS really terrible, but Legba doesn’t actually seem to mind it that much, either, and I know for sure that he DOES mind a) taking pills and b) having his little face washed.

I’m just waiting for Pandora to present with something spectacular. Last year I had to pay $300 to get her TEETH CLEANED, so you know she’s just saving it up.

In case you were wondering, I got the entertainment center into my apartment, although I still need to go to Home Depot and get plywood cut for the cabinet’s back and shelves. E. from my cohort has a jeep, which turned out to be JUST big enough to contain the EC. She helped me get it into the apartment and wouldn’t even take my $10.

I’ve rearranged the furniture again to accomodate it, and I think I’m going to have a lot more room available in the living room once I get those shelves in. I’m also thinking of using the bottom shelf of the cabinet for liquor storage. I didn’t use to have so much liquor that it didn’t all fit in the kitchen, but then my friend Katherine, who was a bartender, moved to San Francisco and gave me all her booze. Maybe I should just have a party.

In other news, my cat Bart (short for Bartimus) has been diagnosed with (probably) a recurrence of the Demodex mites that afflicted him LAST YEAR.

This is very upsetting, because I had to give ALL THREE CATS LIME SULFUR BATHS ONCE A WEEK FOR TWO MONTHS to treat that infestation, and he seemed to recover, and in fact looked fine until last month, when he was starting to get a few scabs here and there that I thought were the result of tussling with the other two, but then over the past week I noticed him licking patches of his stomach raw again, and it was just like the damn mites all over again.

So we went to the vet this morning (boy, the #9 bus sure is crowded at 10:30 on a weekday morning), and they couldn’t find any evidence of the mites on his fur or skin, but then again, they couldn’t find any such evidence last year, either–they only found them when they ran a stool sample, because cats tend to efficiently groom the mites off their hair and into their digestive tracts.

Which I remembered, and so I had actually brought a stool sample, but it takes some time to check them (they have to send it out to the lab), and anyway, the vet said it really did look JUST LIKE last time and every other feline Demodex infestation, so we might as well assume that yes, they really did just lie dormant for ten months.

Fortunately, since they really don’t know shit about feline Demodex, the recommended treatment has changed since last year. They gave me a bottle of Frontline spray to use on all three cats weekly and a two month supply of liquid heartworm medication to give Bart daily–they treat canine Demodex with heartworm meds routinely, but canine Demodex tend to live further down the hair shaft and are thus more vulnerable to internal medicines that then permeate the skin; they don’t really know how much it will help with a cat.

The medicine is labeled for cattle use, however, and is cheap, so we’re giving it a go. If he isn’t improved in the next couple of weeks, she said to bring him back for steroids, just in case it’s actually an allergic reaction to something, but I kind of doubt it. He never had allergies before, and the last time he had these symptoms, he also had Demodex mites. I just hope this treatment actually works.