A spoon full of sugar

Him: What is this? Room service?
Me: I want to get some pictures of her outside. I am going to do a blog post about the kitty.
Him: I didn’t know you could put swear words on a blog post.


She is old and the end of her days on earth is probably coming sooner than later. But who knows? She is going downhill, but her quality of life has not deteriorated so much that she needs to be euthanized.

She became our son's cat when he was living in a house in the Boot Heel, and he really loved her.

Then he moved to an apartment in St. Louis in 2001 or 2002, and because she was not suited to be an entirely indoor cat, he took a cat I had rescued from being put to sleep that had been de-clawed and who hated us (but she loved him) and we took Squeaker in trade. She was about 2 years old then.

We sort of have a love-hate relationship with her. Sometimes she is just adorable...

and sometimes she is incredibly irritating and we say mean things about her. But, we are committed to taking care of her as best we can.

So, she is at least 18 years old now. She has never been a robust cat, but her weight has dropped to barely 6 pounds. Her backbone is prominent through her fur.

She started coughing. I took her to the vet, but her lungs were clear. He gave us a liquid antibiotic just in case. What a struggle we had to get the medicine down her. Half of it would end up all over us. We had a few days left to give it to her before I figured out we could mix it in with her morning tablespoon of tuna and get it down her that way.

Then, a few weeks ago she started having seizures, and the frequency was increasing. The vet did a thyroid test to see if that was causing the weight loss. Her thyroid is fine.

He prescribed phenobarbital at 0.5 mL twice daily for the seizures. Apparently this formula is for pediatric patients, and the vet said it has sort of a cherry flavor.

After the struggle we had with the antibiotic, we knew we weren’t going to be trying to stick the syringe in her mouth and squirt it in.

Fortunately, she likes ice cream and especially strawberry cheesecake-flavored ice cream. 

The ice cream masks the taste of the phenobarbital, and she licks it up.

The medicine has worked well. She hasn’t had a seizure since we started giving it to her.

 So she gets a spoon full of ice cream twice daily to help the medicine go down.