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Concerning Cats

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The most important thing to learn from my experience will be the first and the last thing I say in it: if your pet has a sudden change in behavior, get help immediately. Don’t walk—run to the nearest vet and figure out what’s going on.

It all started in March. For the two years that I had been living with my fiancée and her adorable, feisty furball India, I was greeted at the bed by a head-butt and a purr every evening when I got home from work. Head-butts and purrs usually lead to a happy kitty having attention lavished upon her. So when I came into the room for a week straight without being greeted, I was worried. What was even more concerning was the fact that she was sleeping alone under the desk, rather than nestled between our legs like usual. Well, everyone has an off-week, right? Besides, it was a particularly warm week; I figured that India just didn’t want to heat herself up any more than absolutely necessary. But when I got the chance to break out the laser pointer, then the catnip mouse, and then a long colorful shoelace with no response, some small voice of panic inside of me welled up and shouted that something was wrong.

A quick Google search told us that severe lethargy in cats can be capital-B Bad. Or it could mean nothing. But when it comes to the lives of pets (a.k.a., family), always err on the side of caution.

It was already after-hours at the vet when we were incited to action on Friday night, and our normal vet was out of the office for the next week on vacation. So, we found the next closest vet with the next closest appointment—I worked from home Monday so that I could bring India in as soon as the clinic was open. (My boss and coworkers were extremely understanding throughout this process, allowing me to work remotely. In any case, it wouldn’t have stopped me from getting India the attention she needed.) Into the carrier and off to the vet we went!

When your cat is healthy, you don’t necessarily pay attention to things like their urination or defecation. This is especially the case if you have a closed litter box and clean it on a regular schedule instead of checking daily. But these are things that the vet wanted to know, and they were answers that I couldn’t readily produce. As an indoor cat, we thought that the vectors through which India could be hurt were minimal. They told me to keep an eye on her and bring her into our normal vet as soon as possible since blood tests and x-rays showed no problems.

Rallied by the “all clear” that I received from the first vet, we thought that maybe India was just feeling a bit older and didn’t feel like moving around as much in the heat. Regardless, we got an appointment with our vet and brought her in together. Once again, blood tests and urine tests were performed, and everything came out as “normal.” Our vet asked us about a few common household chemicals and whether or not India had been around them. Of course, she hadn’t. The vet thought that maybe she had gotten into something and just needed her system flushed, so we left her at the clinic overnight to get some extra observation and IV fluids, and were hoping to pick her up the next day.

After observing her overnight, the vet decided that they wanted to keep her an additional night. On the phone, the vet asked us once again if there was anything that she could have gotten into. “We don’t even have human food where she can get to it. The only things that she can easily get to are her food and water. She gets a catnip toy when supervised, and we give her flea medicine to her every month…” The vet took some notes and said that she would get back to us the next day. We picked her up two days after dropping her off, and the vet gave us the likely culprit: her flea medicine.

Our vet had gone through the flea medicine’s ingredient list and had done research on each item. The “organic” and “green” flea medicine that we were using (stocked at a small child’s eye-level at Safeway and Petco) contained an ingredient that was so toxic that humans were required to wear skin- and eye-protection when handling it. This wasn’t the typical “IRRITANT” label that anyone who has used sunscreen is used to. As for the products claims of being “green,” our vet helpfully pointed out that arsenic and cyanide are “natural and organic” as well. If the medicine’s ingredients can cause such severe harm in humans, how much worse is that damage for a being that’s a tenth of our size? Quite a lot worse, as it turns out.

Had we had any previous indications or reactions, we may have looked online and seen the hundreds of reviews of this particular product, many claiming that their pets were poisoned almost to the point of death (or were sadly killed) by this product. Since this happened as a result of the build-up of over a year’s worth of applications, we never suspected that something that hadn’t caused her any issues before was the culprit of her sudden health problems. How were we supposed to know that counterfeit and bogus flea medicines are some of the pet industry’s top money makers? The vet informed us—our mouths agape—that some popular flea medicine brands are counterfeited so convincingly that grocery suppliers often can’t even tell the difference, leading them to be stocked at your friendly neighborhood corner store.

For a week after we got her back, we had to give her daily subcutaneous fluids to help flush out as much of the poison as possible—this meant we had a giant bag of saline hanging from our ceiling fan, and every day started and ended with one of us holding her down while the other shoved a needle of cold fluid into her neck. We’re now almost three months after the fact, and India still hasn’t recovered. Because of her lethargic response to the poisoning, not moving around caused severe muscle atrophy in her hind legs and she now has a hard time getting around and doing normal kitty things—holding herself up in the litter box, jumping on anything, walking across the room. We have done everything we can to make sure that she’s comfortable and happy, including replacing her litter box with one that has a lower wall so that she can get into it easier and adding a set of kitty stairs to our room so that she can get off the bed easier. We’ve taken her to a feline physical therapist, and now have a set of rehabilitation exercises that we perform with her morning and night.

Even though we’re still working through the mechanics of this ending (and it isn’t exactly the happiest), we now have a story to share with all pet owners: only trust the flea medicine you get from your veterinarian, and if your pet has a sudden change in behavior, get help immediately.

Photo by Sara Slattery

Photo by Sara Slattery

Health

A Healthier Alternative to the New Year’s Resolution

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Happy New Year, everyone. Please allow me to state my unpopular opinion: I consider New Year’s resolutions to be the devil. Yes, I realize that resolving to accomplish certain goals every January can really help people have a positive outlook on their futures and motivate themselves, but: 1) People very rarely have the wherewithal to stick with them (which is the most obvious drawback) and 2) New Year’s resolutions cause you to reflect upon the past year and think of all the shit you did not accomplish. As in, “Oh God, there goes another year and I didn’t change careers / put myself out there in the dating world / lose ten pounds…” You fill in the blank. Woe is you. You messed up this year, huh? But that’s okay, because next year you will do all those things! Right? Right! Except there’s a chance you might not. Because point #1.

But what if, instead of making New Year’s resolutions, we did Past Year’s reflections? I think this method is a healthier, glass-half-full approach to prepare for the next 365 days. Sure, there are some things you wish you could have done this past year, things you really hope you’ll do next year. But why not catalog all the really cool, life-changing things that you did do? It can feel like time is speeding up in all sorts of odd ways as we age, and it’s easy to lose track of the milestones as the year flies by. Reflecting upon the past twelve months reminds me how long a year actually is, and I wind up realizing that I have made progress as a human being.

Ready? Awesome, I’ll start, and I’ll start by being perfectly honest. This past year wasn’t one of my favorites. There were a lot of personal hurdles to confront family-wise, work-wise, self-wise, money-wise, pet-ownership-wise… pretty much all of the wises. But every time an obstacle cropped up, the way I ultimately chose to deal with it was with the pat on the back I gifted myself. I might not have compiled all the Facebook-friendly accolades that usually qualify as “milestones.” This year, mine were quieter and more personal but no less valuable.

Sure, there were a few big moments: I moved in with a significant other. We adopted a rescue dog and showered her with love. I left my Hollywood assistant job and launched my freelancing career, ignoring how much the prospect terrified me. I finished writing my first book. Then I rewrote it. And rewrote it again. (I’m still rewriting it again.) So, yeah, these are big, important things! But the moments in between these big, important things, when life was definitely not throwing me a Get-it-Girl parade, are the moments in which I feel I grew the most. And they’re the moments I think I’m proudest of.

I learned how to enrich my relationship with my family from afar when someone close to me confronted a health crisis. There was a lot of flying back and forth to New York for a few months, and I had to really weigh the pros and cons of my life on the opposite coast. That was scary. So was the realization that the healthy status-quo of your parents is not permanent by any means: it’s something we all know on a very basic level, but it’s different when you really start to know it. I’m not proud of how much I yo-yoed emotionally during that time. But I’m proud of and happy with my decision to stay on the West Coast. By even suggesting that I’d move back East, I was giving my family the impression that the situation we were in might be worse than it actually was. They wanted me to keep on keeping on so that we could establish a new normal. So I did. And they did, too. That was a huge thing to have learned. Life is full of establishing “New Normals” when something doesn’t go as planned.

Another “New Normal” (and yes, I’m sensing a pattern here) that I had to establish was in regard to my dog Sydney—the peanut butter to my jelly, the Hobbes to my Calvin. Sydney underwent major surgery on both her eyes and went completely blind due to glaucoma. I had to teach her how to “see” her world in a new way, and boy… it was tough. For weeks, I couldn’t even get her to walk to the front gate of our apartment complex. But every day I set a goal for the two of us to accomplish, however small, and every day, she achieved that goal with my help. Eventually, “Today, we’ll take five steps to the water bowl” turned into “Today, we’ll run up the stairs for a treat.” And I also finally paid off that enormous vet bill. We definitely have a new normal in our household, but I don’t think I’ve ever learned so much about patience as it relates to adaptability in all living things.

“Patience and Adaptability” could totally be the theme song for my recent career move as well. After several years of working different assistant jobs throughout the entertainment industry, I decided to strike out on my own and start freelancing as a writer. I prepared for it. I gave myself a financial cushion. I pulled together a portfolio that I was proud of. I forced myself to take on projects that I didn’t really think were up my alley, just to see if I could broaden my range. Yes, I was super nervous and had daily panic attacks for a month or so. And yeah, money is tight when you do this. It’s unpredictable. But like I said, patience, adaptability, and establishing a new normal have been my jam for 2013. And I’m happier. I might not be exactly where I want to be career-wise at the moment, but I’ll be damned if I’m not pleased as punch with my decision to go for it.

And what’s that they say about long-term goals? That they’re long-term, right? Patience and discipline pays off, little by little. Before you know it, a year has gone by, and that “little-by-little” has started to look like pretty awesome progress. I think pursuing long-term career goals is a lot like climbing a tree (which 8-year-old Liz was definitely the authority on). You don’t realize how high you’ve climbed ‘till you look down, and by then, it’s usually a lot easier to keep climbing than to try to make your way back to the ground. The only difference is that once you reach the top of your career-goals tree, you won’t be yelling for your dad to come out with the ladder and help you get back down before it gets dark out.

To those of you who are suffocating yourselves with New Year’s resolutions in light of all the things you think you didn’t accomplish in 2013—cut yourself some slack. Reflect upon this past year and take stock of how you changed personally. I feel great after writing this, much better than I would have in February 2014 after realizing that I hadn’t even scratched the surface of whatever my New Year’s resolution was. Even if you had a tough year and you don’t think your milestones actually look like milestones… look closer. Not all progress is heralded by 100 “likes” and a tornado of congratulatory texts.

Move ahead with each passing year, but don’t beat yourself up over goals you were unable to accomplish when life got in the way. If you did your best with the circumstances you were dealt this past year and you know it, then guess what? You just won New Year’s.