It’s Furious Balancing

I have always prided myself on having a special talent — I can pill a cat on the first try.

If there are any other cat owners out there reading this, I’m sure they’re nodding their heads and saying to themselves, “My, what skill; I wish I could do that.”

It seems as though I’ve lost my special touch. Gregor needs to take a month’s worth of nutritional support-type pills to help repair some liver enzyme elevation in his latest bloodwork. Yeah, I had to read that sentence over twice myself. The upshot is that he had some elevated liver enzyme (ALT) in his last blood test. We don’t know what causes this, but it’s indicative that his liver is trying to repair itself from being damaged in some way. He could have had overexposure to a cleaning product (unlikely in my house) or this could be real honest-to-goodness liver damage. In any event, he looks and behaves as he always has, and I’m supposed to give him a Denamarin pill each day.

These are hard, coated, blue pills about half the size of an M&M, and I’ll be damned if that cat didn’t spit it out three times yesterday.

I’ve always said that the secret to effective cat pilling is to grab the cat without reservation, putting him between your knees and squatting behind him to prevent his squirming away. Grasp cat firmly. Show no fear or hesitation. Open mouth and place pill on the fold of the cat’s tongue, towards the back. Hold the cat’s mouth shut and stroke his throat to encourage swallowing. After a moment, release cat.

I did this twice yesterday, and I swear the little bugger kept it in his mouth for 30 seconds (if not longer) while he waited for me to release him so he could go into the next room to spit it out. On my third and final attempt, after he fled the scene, I did hear the thin clicky-clatter of a pill hitting the hardwood floor.

I think it rolled under my bookcases.

Damn feline.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 6:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.