In which the Brat has a Problem

Pretty Lady's household is in an uproar. Chaos and distress are the order of the day. The Brat's FLUTD has returned.

The Brat's first episode with this noxious syndrome happened a little over a year and a half ago. It appeared to resolve itself after a trip to the emergency vet, and a course of antibiotics. Well and good.

The next time it happened, then, Pretty Lady simply phoned the vet and got a renewal of the prescription. Unfortunately, two courses of pills later, the symptoms returned. We obtained expensive urinalyses, which were inconclusive. We journeyed to another vet for an X-ray, to determine if he had a bladder stone; the X-ray came up clean. The second vet prescribed an expensive cat food, which both cats utterly refused to consume. The urinary problem seemed to clear up on its own.

Then, all thought of bladder problems paled when the Brat came down from the ceiling one afternoon, frothing at the mouth.

(I must pause to describe what I mean by 'came down from the ceiling.' Once upon a time, long long ago, the Brat was making an unholy racket on the floor of the studio. The Angry Atheist happened to be inhabiting the loft at the time, and asked the Brat to stop--being fluent in common alley-cat. The Brat said, "Oh, yeah? Make me!" The Angry Atheist, a vocational rock climber, took the Brat at his word, and descended suddenly from the loft, in the manner of an attacking panther. The terror which this produced in the Brat caused him to literally hit the ceiling, as he scrambled atop the kitchen cabinet in his dash for safety, whereupon he serendipitously discovered that the ceiling panels were unsecured. He made his way into the crawl space in the attic, and stayed there for 18 hours. Since then, he retreats to his ceiling whenever under stress. The ceiling panels are, regrettably, unsecurable.)

When the Brat came down from the ceiling that fateful afternoon, he was not so much frothing as drooling copiously. In a panic, Pretty Lady raced him to the emergency vet once more. He vomited twice in the car, a distressing green slimy substance. The emergency vet performed expensive, inconclusive lab tests and sent him home. His condition continued to worsen; he was unable to retain any food or fluids at all, and even an eyedropper of water triggered a copious attack of green slime.

Subsequent visits to the regular vet produced no improvement in his condition. Lab tests indicated a strong suspicion of distemper, despite the fact that he was duly vaccinated, in his birthplace of Mexico. The vet wanted to do more tests; Pretty Lady asked, "Will they DO anything?"

The answer was, of course, no--there is nothing one can do to treat distemper, except wait. So Pretty Lady requested a subcutaneous fluid injection apparatus, with which she was able to keep his system hydrated, and returned home, where she installed him in his Mexican cat basket and administered daily doses of fluids and Reiki.

The Brat slept almost continuously in the basket for three months. He ate almost nothing, and dwindled to a small bundle of bones. Pretty Lady suspected AIDS, despite his celibate lifestyle.

Then one day, she opened a can of tuna. The Brat gave tongue, and consumed it. Six weeks later, he was back to his rambunctious self--with a newly acquired tendency to ask for Reiki at bedtime.


Thrilled to have snatched her darling from the jaws of death, Pretty Lady fed him anything he wanted after that. She figured that any remaining bladder crystals would certainly have purged themselves during his long fast.

Evidently, they are back. For the last three days, the Brat has been emerging from the ceiling only long enough to leave bloody stains on anything soft and receptive; Pretty Lady has been following him around with a bottle of lavender bleach and a pile of rags. She has administered leftover painkillers and leftover antibiotics from the fruitless journeys to the vet, but is loathe to take him in again.

The unfortunate fact is that vets, in Pretty Lady's copious recent experience, have a tendency to spend thousands of dollars of her money on tests, without doing anything to help her cat. An Internet search on FLUTD confirmed this phenomenon:

A diagnosis is not usually found for most cats with FLUTD. When a diagnosis is not found, veterinarians must use treatment plans that seem to have worked in the past or which seem to be consistent with current disease theory. This approach is called “Empirical Therapy” and does not always work. As newer information is revealed, treatment protocols will be revised. FLUTD is an especially dynamic area of research today and new information and fresh theory can certainly be expected in the next few years.

This time round, Pretty Lady simply does not have a thousand dollars to spend on pretending to take care of the problem. So she is administering Reiki, the occasional painkiller, removing access to dry cat food, and waiting. It is miserable for all of us. Please pray.