I suppose there's a reason I only have feline emergencies on Friday nights.
This time, Yinzhen was vomiting bloody-yukness (I'll spare you the incident-by-incident breakdown). After several discussions with the vet-tech-on-call at the emergency vet hospital, we determined that since she wasn't showing distress and it was nearly 2 am, waiting until my vet opened in the morning would be fine. Assuming she didn't throw up more than a couple more times (!).
So I brought both cats into the bedroom (that's where the litterbox is), along with some fresh water, and closed the door. Yinzhen had a bit of water, and then ran to the litterbox to vomit a bit more bloody yukness. She didn't entirely make it, but that did make clean-up a bit easier (good kitty!). And one or the other cat was climbing all over me all night long -- I think Keemun wanted her crunchies, which I'd left outside to remove any temptation from Yinzhen.
Talked to the vet first thing in the morning, & brought her over. Just to enhance the adventure, I needed to take my car into the shop -- there was some sort of hole in the tubey-thingies & you could smell the exhaust (I suppose it's worth $499 to not breath carbon monoxide). Cat-loving neighbor was out, but the cab didn't take too long.
New vet at the practice likes my voice (?), possibly in contrast to the, um, boisterous atmosphere of the place, and thought that Yinzhen might've swallowed something-bad-or-other. I'm pretty careful about that, but y'know... And new vet agreed, "I've found random things around and been, like 'linear foreign body!'" So they did xrays to look for foreign bodies (linear or otherwise), and found 'something that might be something.' We discussed doing a more complicated xray (barium), but they just went ahead and did surgery.
Didn't find any bodies, foreign or domestic, but they did find a couple swollen lymph nodes and thickened intestinal walls. This might mean IBD (Inflammatory Bowel Disease) -- "IBD describes a group of chronic gastrointestinal disorders. Microscopically the disease is characterized by the infiltration of inflammatory cells into the lining (mucosa) of the digestive tract. The cause of IBD is unknown, but the microscopic changes in the tissues (histopathology) imply that immunologic factors play an important role." There may be pills to give (yay!), and you have to play with their diet. Both of my geriatric cats developed IBD, though it didn't show up until their teens. I was sort of hoping for another decade or so before I had to deal with this sort of thing again...
Oh, and note to self: no more emergency vet adventures on weekends allowed. Especially on weekends before an election. Additional note: just get the damn caller-ID for the landline phone already. Or stop giving that number out. And note to politicians: the more auto-calls and surveys I get, the less enthused I am about voting for you...
I was supposed to bring Yinzhen home today, but she refused food & developed a bit of a fever (they syringe-fed her, and the fever's gone down), so they wanted to keep her another night. Sigh.
Car's fixed, though. I might ask cat-loving neighbor to drive me to pick her up tomorrow, though -- she'll appreciate it, I think. And Yinzhen has this tendency to grab onto me at the vet & not let me put her back into the carrier -- I adopted her from this vet, so she's not letting me leave without her. Again, sigh.
Keemun, meanwhile, seems to be enjoying my undivided attention. And she yelled at me for going out and leaving her all alone...
Keemun getting a bit aggravated with Yinzhen's grooming attentions...
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