Just a thought on the travellling, not even sure if this is helpful at vthis stage, you know bfg is not a fan either. Do you take her in we can carrier in the car? Dr M suggested I put him in a larger cage. I have a large dog crate so I put Georges bed and litter tray in there, and put him in the back of the car back seats down so he could see what was going on. That was much less taumatic for george, I wish I'd been doing it for years.
I am so sorry for your experience at the vets.
Could you try a consult over the phone with our old vet? You could email all lab an relevant information, let him look over it and then phone to discuss.??
Thanks Gill.
Sending more vines for George!
Asia used to travel really well and enjoyed cat rides, she went on vacation with us every year and sometimes came along to run errands. I think about the time she lost her hearing it became difficult for her, probably some equilibrium thing. She now gets car sick, I didn’t have Cerenia before, I think that stops her from getting sick, but it doesn’t take care of the stress element or whatever else is happening in her body aside from the nausea. I’ve always brought her carrier for when we exit the car, but she has free roam of the SUV with a litter box she can access. She finds a place to sit and just hangs out. The last time she travelled was right before the Christmas Eve where the UTI happened. My old vet said though there’s not an official reason for it, she’s seen stress cause UTIs before.
I could do a phone consult with her, and that’s exactly what I did when Asia was diagnosed with diabetes and I did not like that first vet that diagnosed her and was skeptical of being asked to shoot blind and all that. I wasn’t sure if it was fair to do this whole diabetes thing to Asia at her age and if there would be any quality of life for her with diabetes (this was before I found FDMB). She told me absolutely, if I could regulate the diabetes, she had excellent quality of life potential with it. The problem is she hasn’t actually seen Asia since 2016 and she is a mobile vet, so with complex things that can’t be managed at home, she had a network of small animal hospitals that she referred out to for things like surgery and more sophisticated diagnostic tests.
I’m certain what’s going on with Asia at the moment is out of her wheelhouse, she would have referred me to an IM and she would just be the keeper of the information and oversee the case from the standpoint of doing occasional blood labs and speaking with her colleagues. Is she the most amazing and knowledgeable vet there ever was, no, but what she has in spades is that she knows her patients as she sees them in their home environment and not just stressed out at the vet and she knows when something is beyond her capabilities and has a highly qualified network of other vets she works with to take it from there.
Knowing Asia as well as the other vets she would send me to, she would be an intermediary and I’m hoping (but not positive) that alone would avoid me situations such as yesterday’s. So I already know she would tell me to do pretty much exactly what I’m doing, but I don’t have the benefit of seeing people she has a working relationship with. The guy she referred me to with Asia’s resorptive disease was like a rock star oral surgeon that was even called in to treat large cats at the National Zoo. Not someone you could just walk in and get an appointment with. Asia was seen immediately and had her surgery that same day. I don’t recall anyone saying “you’ll kill her,” she was 13 and we all considered her “old” at that time, to boot she was very, very sick, on death’s door and worse off then than anything she’s been through this past year. It was a no brainer, if the surgery didn’t kill her, the teeth would as they were already doing.
