#fuzz therapy

A couple things seem to be helping me. Well, one is Dude, I make him hold her and sit down so I can reach. But another is that she’s petite and not very strong, and a third is that when she was a kitten we used to sometimes hold her in a restraint position when she was being totally nuts, and she’d try to escape but she was too little. As a result of this, she will often genuinely believe that if a human is holding her, she can’t escape; she’ll struggle to let us know she wants to go, but if she doesn’t succeed, she doesn’t keep trying. (And I know once Dude really did hang onto her in a dangerous situation where she was genuinely trying to get away, and she scratched the everloving fuck out of him but he didn’t let go, so that reinforced it.) She just doesn’t struggle hard, because she believes she can’t succeed.

I know, and you know, that she damn well could, so I’m really really grateful for this. I’ve had some run-ins with cats who knew I couldn’t hold them if they really tried, and I’ve got actual scars in a couple of places, so. But not Chita! 

I’ve experimented, and she’ll still take treats from my hands. And she’ll still sit in my lap and snuggle. and she spent the entire night sleeping on my arm/face. So, I guess she’s not mad.

The one thing I’ve found important is to dampen the pill, as this is a kind of powdery one. One time I didn’t and I think it caught in her throat, she was coughing afterwards and seemed disgruntled. But if I put a little water on it, then fling it in there, it goes right down. 

You really gotta toss it, though, you can’t set shit down on her tongue or she’ll spit it out.

Let’s hope this is as difficult as it gets. 

She went into hiding for a couple of hours yesterday, sulking or maybe just sleeping, but I don’t know if it was pill-related. She was on Dude’s lap and the fridge made a weird noise, and he turned to look at it, and after a moment she suddenly freaked out so bad she got one of her back claws stuck in his arm and ripped a chunk of his skin. I think she hurt her toe; she’s yelped at me a couple times while I was holding her since then. Anyway, she vanished for a couple of hours, and didn’t answer when I wandered through the house calling for her, but then she came out in the evening like nothing had happened, so I guess she’s okay and not feeling too weird. 

Dude went and bought her replacement cat food, the kind she had before, and she went right back to eating it, so I guess that was the problem after all. 

You just never know, with cats. They hide so much. We had no idea she had a UTI, she was behaving perfectly normally. And we wouldn’t have known she was having thyroid issues, she’s slender but that’s the shape she’s always been. I guess her numbers weren’t really bad for either condition, but they were noticeable.