Happily Ever After
Life in The Rural Retreat with a beautiful wife, three cats, garden wildlife, a camera, a computer – and increasing amounts about running
Earlier posts can be found on Adventures of a Lone Bass Player, where this blog began life. Recent entries can be found here.
The Woes Of Maia, Part 122
by Russell Turner - 21:07 on 08 May 2020
Life has always been hard for Maia, The Rural Retreat’s small panther: incarceration in two SSPCA institutions after (we surmise) being abandoned on the mean streets of Edinburgh at barely a year old because her allergies were too expensive to manage; finding a new home alongside two boisterous kittens, now grown, when she’d rather be an only cat; monthly trips to the vet for immunotherapy injections to control her allergies. Existence is tough, her anguish only slightly lifted by Matchgirl’s tireless ministrations and lots of food.
So neither she nor we were much surprised when Dr Vet diagnosed more woes during The Grumpy One’s latest visit to the clinic.
Maia’s always been keen to know that her next meal isn’t far away but lately she’s been particularly vocal in her demands. She’s also been unusually active, often at the expense of poor Pandora who’s regularly at the wrong end of one of her cuffings, restless and prone to early-morning vomitings. All these behaviours, plus a racing heart, alerted the medic to a new condition, confirmed by a blood test as hyperthyroidism.
The good news is that, thanks to her monthly visits, it’s been caught early and isn’t too far gone. The bad news is that she’ll be on tablets for the rest of her life or become briefly radioactive after being injected with something to kill her thyroid gland. The only other option is surgery.
Matchgirl’s Google search (of course) also produced the dismal news that after being filled with radioactive iodine our cat couldn’t be cuddled or smooched for at least two weeks, shouldn’t be let out of the Retreat and shouldn’t be let her on kitchen worktops – presumably so we wouldn’t glow in the dark too.
Tablets will be the short term solution, the first batch to be collected on Monday. What happens after that remains to be seen.
Further animal news comes from the garden, where the Bushnell continues to capture Brock, and which last night also snapped Reynard for the first time this year; still no martens though, and we’ve not seen hedgehogs for quite a while.
It's nice to see you still have nighttime visits, we had a fox in our garden a night or two ago, and the hedgehogs are back.
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