Needles

Our senior cat, Chatham, hasn't been doing well lately. He's been taking liver pills for many years now, and occasionally has urinary tract infection. The latter can kill a cat pretty quickly. This time the infection isn't clearing up very much, and now the things that the Vet measures in his liver and kidneys are up too high. He hasn't been eating - sometimes he's interested but nauseated and other times he's just not interested. He's not always emptying his bladder and not drinking enough water.

Soooo ... he got to have his bladder emptied by the Vet (oh, fun) and was rehydrated recently. He was noticeably better the day after, but then the next day was off again. So DH and I went in to learn how to "give him fluids" - i.e. stick a needle under the skin and drip fluid in.

I get to do it, because DH doesn't like needles. Who does? (Don't answer that.) The Vet promptly said to me "why is it always the men who don't like needles?"

It wasn't has hard or awful as I thought it would be. So I'll be doing this for the next ten days, every day. After that we may go to every other day.

If you are interested in how to do this, this website explains the process.