This is going to be long, so if you dont want to read a book you might want to move along. You have been warned. So feb into march is always the busiest time of the year for my company. I'm usually only home for a couple of days during that time frame. This year was no different. I went to Baltimore, DC, Durban South Africa, Denver, Las Vegas, and Atlanta. I think i was home for about 48 hours total over the month. All that travel and only lost my luggage once, needless to say it was after flying in from South Africa and going to Denver the next morning. United baggage transfer sucks balls!!!! While in Denver my wife called and said our outdoor cat Tabby had been attacked and bitten on her shoulder. She rushed her to the emergency vets on red bank and they said she should be fine in a couple of days. Two days later she was having a lot of trouble breathing, took her back to the vets and they did emergency surgery, found nothing wrong. When she woke up she was still struggling for breath so we decided to end her suffering and had her put down. I came home from Atlanta on Friday March 9th. We took my other cat, Putz who was 12 years old, to the vet for a routine check up and get what we thought was a dry skin problem looked at. The vet gave him a shot for the itching and we brought him home. He had been moping around the house all weekend, we figured it was because of him missing Tabby. I came down sick on Monday, went to the doctors on Tuesday and found I have strep. I came home to find Putz just laying on the floor, not nearly as active as he usually is, but didn't think anything of it. When my wife got home, he was laboring for breath. Needless to say we were off to the emergency vets again. I think I broke every driving law heading down to Red Bank. We got him to the vets and they put him on oxygen. They wanted to settle him down to take x-rays. When they finally got the taken, much to our surprise, they found broken vertibrea (sp) in his hind quarters. Evidently it wasn't dry skin, it was bone chips that were bothering him. The steroid shot our normal vet gave him cause a reaction that caused his lungs to fill with fluid. Over the hour at the emergency vets, he got progressively worse so we once again had to make the choice to let him go. That was one of the roughest decisions I have ever had to make, they were both our children.
Thanks you for letting me vent.