Luckie Kitty's Tail

Luckie had a wonderful summer. We moved up to camp in June and lived there through mid-September. She was eating well on her own, she was drinking plenty and we had refined the art of giving her meds orally. This, however, was a two-person job. Luckie didn’t enjoy it, but she wasn’t a monster about it either. One of our other cats, TK, has been on medicine a few times, and she is a monster. She anticipates when the next dose is coming and hides very well, then squirms and screams like you’re killing her. Luckie made the weakest attempts at hiding—always in the same place, and always easy to get her out of. I’m still not sure if she just wasn’t smart enough to hide from us or if she was only putting on a half-hearted struggle just for show. Having her medications compounded at a pharmacy was helpful--expensive, but worth it. They make efforts to flavor it more favorably than your typical pharmaceutical company does. If you’re going to have some fluid syringed into your mouth, it might as well not be repulsive. The medicines that were in pill form were fun. She got pretty good at spitting those back out at me, which forced me to get better at putting them where she couldn’t do that. I got my fingers bit more than once.

It was a difficult transition going from being the “good guy” who filled her belly with warm food, to the “bad guy” who shoved medicines down her throat. Another transition was Luckie becoming more independent. Since the previous fall, she had rarely been more than a few feet from us at any time when we were home with her. She had become a lap cat and was usually curled up with one of us whenever we were sitting. At camp, and free of the tube, she didn’t seem to need us in the same way and would rather curl up in a spot of sun than come into the camp and sit with us.