Wednesday I saw a client at the clinic and while I was there I decided to make an appointment to take Whit in. My thinking was that I wanted the first appointment in the morning when we’d be less likely to have to wait and the waiting and exam rooms fresh and clean and about as free of possibly threatening other animal scents as a veterinary clinic possibly could be. Because the practice is a busy one, I also thought it could be several weeks before such an opening would be available. Wrong. As it turned out, a quirk of fate created an opening for the next morning. When I heard that, I initially panicked, and had to take a breath to keep from saying, “No, not that soon. I’m not ready yet.”
So this morning I put Whit in Ollie’s crate (in which he’d become accustom to sleeping) with minimal resistance and off we went. Although he yowled pathetically for a while, he soon settled down. All things considered, he did very well and I was the only one who wound up with any wounds and that was only one little claw puncture. As soon as Susan (the vet) was able to open his mouth with me holding him and I could see that his teeth, gums, and color were in pretty good shape, hyperthyroidism moved up on the list of differentials. It also moved up because of the highly accelerated beat of his heart I could feel in my hand as I held him. It was so fast, it was as if I were holding my canary to clip his nails.
Although it took two of us to hold him, Whit donated enough blood from a back leg vein for routine screening and thyroid testing and we came home with medication to damp down his thyroid activity. When I called in later for the results, the hyperthyroidism was strongly confirmed and there was some indication of liver involvement.
So that’s where we are now. For the next 3 weeks I’ll be medicating him twice a day, which I hope he’ll eat in his food. If he won’t, then I’ll try to pill him. If that proves too stressful for both of us, I’ll get the medication in a transdermal form I can massage into his ears. At the end of the 3 weeks, the blood work will be repeated and if everything looks OK relative to his ability to handle surgery, it will be done that same day.
As I was driving to the appointment, I kept thinking that there was no way I could fit anything else into a schedule already crammed full. But that’s the way it always is, isn’t it? You think you can’t find the time or energy for one more thing, and then disaster or semi-disaster strikes and puts everything up for grabs, and somehow you do.
I stayed with Whit in the cool basement where the dogs can’t go until he calmed down, then I went back to work and somehow got everything done that I’d intended. Later I watched him as he lounged under the living room windows
until he got so tired of me staring and the camera, that he left.
For a while my mind was so full I couldn’t decide what to fix for dinner.
Then I settled on pizza.
And opened a bottle of wine, whether to celebrate that we’d made it this far or to forget how far we still had to go, I have no idea.