Oh, I'm betting that they will be fine. Take a look at the thread titled, "Keeping A Kitten Alive," it's long, but the last couple of pages will show you what is possible with big old "goggies" and itty bitty kitties.
Last edited by a moderator:
-
Too many ads? Join our community of cat lovers now to reduce ads by 90%! Click here to join for free!
Help, sick Kitten
- Thread starter ooojadeooo
- Start Date
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2016
- Messages
- 120
- Purraise
- 66
Oh sounds like you'll have material for making some movies to post!
ix:I'm glad to hear she's doing well.
Do you mind if I offer some advice? I mean not anything about how you're doing things.., I think what you're doing is wonderful and she's lucky someone nice found her and took her in.
No, I just wanted to chat about a couple mistakes I made with my cat when he was new. One was I promised myself I'd save vet money to always keep on hand, and never ever spend it on anything else. And this is easy for people who make good money. But I don't. I barely get by. I have to save for a long time to get anything, and many things I just go without. But still, when I got Captain Meow, I promised to save a couple thousand and stash it away untouchably. But in 8 years, I haven't been able to get it done! It gives me this nightmare scenario to worry about, where he gets sick, and it'd cost $2000 to make him well, but I don't have it, so he dies, and then I have to live with it being my fault because I bought things I could have done without instead of saving like I owed to him to do. I'd be SO crushed. He's my best friend. I can't let him down like that. Yet somehow, because I really am living hand to mouth (no ability to save), I haven't gotten it done. In 8 years.
See, because.. if he's just seen the vet and is healthy now, it'll seem ok to go "I'll start saving next year. He's ok at the moment" But then you say that again, and again. And what I find difficult (perhaps impossible) is to actually put some money aside, and then not all of a sudden urgently need it for something else! And this has been part of my rationale in putting it off too, because if I get caught up, THEN I can save some and not have to dip into it. See? So I'm not irresponsible. I'm just poor.
And since I started, I found that a Vet visit is usually going to cost a lot more than I thought. A friend recommended I get a pet and said it could be done oh so cheaply. And my father always got us a cat and did it cheaply (when the cat would get seriously ill at about 7 years usually, he would have it put down, saying there was no money to save it's life, and he'd tell us our cat had done a lot better than if he'd been living in the wild, AND THERE'S NO VET OUT THERE! And this made sense to him. But it was heartbreaking for us. And I vowed never to do that. I vowed to save. "If he needs the vet, he GETS the vet", I said. But this was back when I innocently thought it'd cost 2 or 3 hundred for a vet visit. Boy was I in for a surprise!
I was told it'd be $190 to check him over initially, give him shots, treat for worms just to be sure, and neuter him as the landlord required. Seemed reasonable. So I took him in, and she traumatized him because she stinks as vets go, and when she was done, she handed me a bill for $500. I said you QUOTED $190, and this extra $300 is for unnecessary extras I NEVER AGREED TO. She said, "in this state if you don't pay in full, I can and will keep your cat and add daily board charges to your bill, till you pay me". And horrible as that seems, that's the law, and that's what they do. They'll hold your loved one HOSTAGE for a little stinking money that they don't even need (oh, vets are affluent) (and this one was robbing me!). But if you try to forcibly leave the vet's office with your pet, the cops will come to your house and arrest you. SO you have to pay. So I gave that total :censor: my grocery money and some of my rent, and took my cat and never went back there again.
I later found a better vet, but I kind of wish someone had told me back then that I could just look up what other people think of the area's vets, on Yelp. It'd would have been good to find a better one, and have him seen SOME times along the way. Even just for some advice, you now? I don't know everything. Did you know you're not supposed to feed your cat dry food? I didn't know that. I thought giving him canned food all the time would be like letting him have treats for dinner. SO he lived on mostly dry food for some years, and as a result kept getting dehydrated and thus constipated, and that can actually kill your cat! (another thing I didn't know). So I came actually here, and these good good people helped me with my concerns and straightened me out with some tips I needed. And now I know that cats are carnivores (they eat ONLY meat), so feeding them dry food (which is made from plants) isn't giving him nutrition his body is made to digest okay. And because they're supposed to get all their water from eating meat only (and so barely ever needing to actually drink any), feeding them dry food means they will NEED to drink water, but still might not because it isn't natural to them. Well, about the fifth or sixth time mine got constipated, he came close to dying. I actually thought he was dead, under the couch. You see in a cat, once their poop gets "blocked", their urine can in turn get blocked too, and THAT can kill them in a few hours, untreated. It's an emergency if they can't pee. It can't wait till morning.
So yea, he was getting constipated, and I would just feed him some oily fish, or buy treats with a little Vaseline in them, and offer him more water, but he still doesn't drink it ever. And I thought I was handling things. Nope. They need to eat JUST MEAT. And when they do, it has all the water they need already in it.
Well my complaint about that though was when a cat needs to eat, they need to do so RIGHT AWAY. (they're not just being demanding when they bug you for food, their systems are different than ours, they cant go an hour or two without eating! So when the cat starts meowing demandingly to be fed, he's actually telling you it's urgent. He's not just being a pest.) So he WILL need a bowl of dry food, and a bowl of water always available, 24 hours, because you can't always guarantee you'll get home in time to feed him, and he will want to eat overnight too. It's unavoidable. Well, "what about the dry food needing to be actually meat?", I asked. And apparently people buy expensive dry food from Chewy.com (a GREAT online store that will ship your cat supplies, and answer questions on the phone) Expensive means $20 for a bag, instead of the usual $4 for Meow Mix. Well I tried the expensive stuff, and he wouldn't eat it. So I've got him on Purina ("Cat Chow Naturals") currently. It's not as good as was suggested to me to get, but it IS a lot better than Meow Mix. And he loves it! (It's actually not bad, and it's affordable.) And the thing is to just keep giving him another tablespoon of the wet (canned) food every time he asks, all day, so he doesn't need to fill up on that dry food. (though he will sometimes anyway, and I still cant get mine to drink, so what I do is add a teaspoon of water to his canned food now, every serving.
I buy him cans of Purina "Fancy Feast". It comes in a choice of pate ("classic") or as flakes with gravy ("grilled"). And I'm able to add water to the pate, but the kind with gravy no because that would make it icky for him.
It matters to always be keeping them hydrated also because dehydration can cause their pee to crystallize and then block -an expensive, life-threatening emergency.
*While I was searching all this nutrition stuff, I found out that Fancy Feast Classic (the pate type) has twice the calories of the Grilled (the flakes in gravy).
And mine gains weight as he ages, so I took him off the Classic for the moment. (I used to switch back & forth so he doesn't have to always eat the same thing.)
*I was also told, if money is an issue the Friskies canned food is nutritionally good (It comes in a larger can, and works out as about half the cost of Fancy Feast).
*And I learned that determining if a food is good or not (canned or dry) begins with the question: "Is some actual meat one of the first 4 listed ingredients?" (preferably one of the first 2)
But who knew this was going to be so difficult!! I've had cats all my life. (My parents did.) But they made it seem easy. Keep the Friskies bowl filled and the cat box clean, and my mother used to buy a 1/2 pound of turkey at the deli and give them a little each day, because she must have known, it matters. They're meat eaters.
But she made it seem so easy! And they never spent money on vets! *sigh*
But I am. Captain Meow is going to live to be 18 or 20. He's not going to die at 7. I insist. So now I worry about all these things.
So here's the tip I wanted to offer about the cost of vets: My friend's dog had an intestinal blockage. The Vet kept it overnight and treated it. $1600. Half a year later, it happened again (so he had to spend $3200 in one year, or his loved one would have died). So this is my sticker shock I had to accept. It's not 1981 anymore. My memory of "what vets cost" was WAY off. So here's the thing I wish I had done faithfully, and you may want to consider it for yours if you want: I figure, at my income level, even if I just managed to put a thousand in a sock and never touched it, that would be admirable enough for someone like me to accomplish. And if I don't do it, and the cat dies, well then I'd be a crummy irresponsible pet owner. -because when they need a vet, it happens suddenly, the cash needs to just be there.
So this is a goal I'm working on right now. (If I finagle things right, I can get it done in three months, and feel better). I already bought him a new pet carrier - one that's cushy and large - and I put cardboard in the bottom and just leave it in the living room. He uses it for a little club house, which is just how we both need him to feel about it, because if it comes time he's gotta get in that thing and "take a ride", he wont fight me over it. (I found a really good one at Chewy.com. It's airline approved even. And it was on sale.)
Is a thousand a sufficient amount of cat health insurance? mm, no. But on my minuscule "fixed income" (no raises or ability to earn more), it'd be a lot better than nothing. And my plan kind of has to be that if he ever does need emergency services, we'll go to the low cost place, because all they require for proof that you're qualified for reduced price vet services is to show them a food card. And yup, I got an "EBT" card. :rolleyes2 (But hey, if you need it, you need it.) So I can get vet services at a greatly reduced price. I'd rather have a more normal income and ability, obviously. But at least I can get things done.
.
Okay this was too long. (Sorry!) And I didn't tell you all this because I decided you needed correcting in any way. I'm just passing on what I learned from these kind
people recently. BUT I WANTED TO POINT OUT THOUGH -that though I painted a scary picture of what vets can cost, you do realize if you saved $38.47 out of each
check (bi-weekly, right?), in two years you'd have a $2000 Vet fund stashed away. (And then you could keep saving that amount but make it for something else!
And I'm sure you know this stuff, and got a handle on things fine, but I didn't want to just state an intimidatingly large amount of money that my friend had
to pay, when his dog got essentially a tummy ache ($3200!!), without also pointing out that spreading the cost out over time can make it easy.
(Oh and if you do ever want to check out lower cost vet services in your area, the local animal shelter probably knows where they are.)
Give Puddin' a hug for us! And check out the rest of this forum and hang around with us too, if you want! It's a really good community
here. I've been at a lot of forums, this is the first one where I didn't get attacked over something I said right off the bat! They're nice
folks. And if you look around here, you'll see games and interesting conversations going on all the time. (And it'd be good, if you
became a regular, because then we could all keep up on how Puddin' is doing!
(But...people stay people go, and that's ok too.(Heck I may not even last, because I put too much effort into my posts and it's exhausting! lol But I will try. Cause I think it's a good
place, and I need people for if Captain Meow needs advice sometime. (lol *thinks of a good gag thread to start now* hmm...)
:rub:
Last edited:
She's adorable!
And she's very lucky too, I agree!
@MeAndCaptinMeow thanks for sharing the advice. I'm sure many members would find it very useful. Why not start a thread in the cat care forum about saving up for vet care and in the cat nutrition forum about how you feel about feeding? I would make the posts shorter too
- Thread Starter Thread Starter
- #24
- Joined
- Aug 8, 2016
- Messages
- 22
- Purraise
- 5
thank you for the advice, I will be starting her on a meaty diet soon and she's got an appointment with my friends vetOh sounds like you'll have material for making some movies to post!
I'm glad to hear she's doing well.
Do you mind if I offer some advice? I mean not anything about how you're doing things.., I think what you're doing is wonderful and she's lucky someone nice found her and took her in.
No, I just wanted to chat about a couple mistakes I made with my cat when he was new. One was I promised myself I'd save vet money to always keep on hand, and never ever spend it on anything else. And this is easy for people who make good money. But I don't. I barely get by. I have to save for a long time to get anything, and many things I just go without. But still, when I got Captain Meow, I promised to save a couple thousand and stash it away untouchably. But in 8 years, I haven't been able to get it done! It gives me this nightmare scenario to worry about, where he gets sick, and it'd cost $2000 to make him well, but I don't have it, so he dies, and then I have to live with it being my fault because I bought things I could have done without instead of saving like I owed to him to do. I'd be SO crushed. He's my best friend. I can't let him down like that. Yet somehow, because I really am living hand to mouth (no ability to save), I haven't gotten it done. In 8 years.
See, because.. if he's just seen the vet and is healthy now, it'll seem ok to go "I'll start saving next year. He's ok at the moment" But then you say that again, and again. And what I find difficult (perhaps impossible) is to actually put some money aside, and then not all of a sudden urgently need it for something else! And this has been part of my rationale in putting it off too, because if I get caught up, THEN I can save some and not have to dip into it. See? So I'm not irresponsible. I'm just poor.
And since I started, I found that a Vet visit is usually going to cost a lot more than I thought. A friend recommended I get a pet and said it could be done oh so cheaply. And my father always got us a cat and did it cheaply (when the cat would get seriously ill at about 7 years usually, he would have it put down, saying there was no money to save it's life, and he'd tell us our cat had done a lot better than if he'd been living in the wild, AND THERE'S NO VET OUT THERE! And this made sense to him. But it was heartbreaking for us. And I vowed never to do that. I vowed to save. "If he needs the vet, he GETS the vet", I said. But this was back when I innocently thought it'd cost 2 or 3 hundred for a vet visit. Boy was I in for a surprise!
I was told it'd be $190 to check him over initially, give him shots, treat for worms just to be sure, and neuter him as the landlord required. Seemed reasonable. So I took him in, and she traumatized him because she stinks as vets go, and when she was done, she handed me a bill for $500. I said you QUOTED $190, and this extra $300 is for unnecessary extras I NEVER AGREED TO. She said, "in this state if you don't pay in full, I can and will keep your cat and add daily board charges to your bill, till you pay me". And horrible as that seems, that's the law, and that's what they do. They'll hold your loved one HOSTAGE for a little stinking money that they don't even need (oh, vets are affluent) (and this one was robbing me!). But if you try to forcibly leave the vet's office with your pet, the cops will come to your house and arrest you. SO you have to pay. So I gave that total :censor: my grocery money and some of my rent, and took my cat and never went back there again.
I later found a better vet, but I kind of wish someone had told me back then that I could just look up what other people think of the area's vets, on Yelp. It'd would have been good to find a better one, and have him seen SOME times along the way. Even just for some advice, you now? I don't know everything. Did you know you're not supposed to feed your cat dry food? I didn't know that. I thought giving him canned food all the time would be like letting him have treats for dinner. SO he lived on mostly dry food for some years, and as a result kept getting dehydrated and thus constipated, and that can actually kill your cat! (another thing I didn't know). So I came actually here, and these good good people helped me with my concerns and straightened me out with some tips I needed. And now I know that cats are carnivores (they eat ONLY meat), so feeding them dry food (which is made from plants) isn't giving him nutrition his body is made to digest okay. And because they're supposed to get all their water from eating meat only (and so barely ever needing to actually drink any), feeding them dry food means they will NEED to drink water, but still might not because it isn't natural to them. Well, about the fifth or sixth time mine got constipated, he came close to dying. I actually thought he was dead, under the couch. You see in a cat, once their poop gets "blocked", their urine can in turn get blocked too, and THAT can kill them in a few hours, untreated. It's an emergency if they can't pee. It can't wait till morning.
So yea, he was getting constipated, and I would just feed him some oily fish, or buy treats with a little Vaseline in them, and offer him more water, but he still doesn't drink it ever. And I thought I was handling things. Nope. They need to eat JUST MEAT. And when they do, it has all the water they need already in it.
Well my complaint about that though was when a cat needs to eat, they need to do so RIGHT AWAY. (they're not just being demanding when they bug you for food, their systems are different than ours, they cant go an hour or two without eating! So when the cat starts meowing demandingly to be fed, he's actually telling you it's urgent. He's not just being a pest.) So he WILL need a bowl of dry food, and a bowl of water always available, 24 hours, because you can't always guarantee you'll get home in time to feed him, and he will want to eat overnight too. It's unavoidable. Well, "what about the dry food needing to be actually meat?", I asked. And apparently people buy expensive dry food from Chewy.com (a GREAT online store that will ship your cat supplies, and answer questions on the phone) Expensive means $20 for a bag, instead of the usual $4 for Meow Mix. Well I tried the expensive stuff, and he wouldn't eat it. So I've got him on Purina ("Cat Chow Naturals") currently. It's not as good as was suggested to me to get, but it IS a lot better than Meow Mix. And he loves it! (It's actually not bad, and it's affordable.) And the thing is to just keep giving him another tablespoon of the wet (canned) food every time he asks, all day, so he doesn't need to fill up on that dry food. (though he will sometimes anyway, and I still cant get mine to drink, so what I do is add a teaspoon of water to his canned food now, every serving.
I buy him cans of Purina "Fancy Feast". It comes in a choice of pate ("classic") or as flakes with gravy ("grilled"). And I'm able to add water to the pate, but the kind with gravy no because that would make it icky for him.
It matters to always be keeping them hydrated also because dehydration can cause their pee to crystallize and then block -an expensive, life-threatening emergency.
*While I was searching all this nutrition stuff, I found out that Fancy Feast Classic (the pate type) has twice the calories of the Grilled (the flakes in gravy).
And mine gains weight as he ages, so I took him off the Classic for the moment. (I used to switch back & forth so he doesn't have to always eat the same thing.)
*I was also told, if money is an issue the Friskies canned food is nutritionally good (It comes in a larger can, and works out as about half the cost of Fancy Feast).
*And I learned that determining if a food is good or not (canned or dry) begins with the question: "Is some actual meat one of the first 4 listed ingredients?" (preferably one of the first 2)
But who knew this was going to be so difficult!! I've had cats all my life. (My parents did.) But they made it seem easy. Keep the Friskies bowl filled and the cat box clean, and my mother used to buy a 1/2 pound of turkey at the deli and give them a little each day, because she must have known, it matters. They're meat eaters.
But she made it seem so easy! And they never spent money on vets! *sigh*
But I am. Captain Meow is going to live to be 18 or 20. He's not going to die at 7. I insist. So now I worry about all these things.
So here's the tip I wanted to offer about the cost of vets: My friend's dog had an intestinal blockage. The Vet kept it overnight and treated it. $1600. Half a year later, it happened again (so he had to spend $3200 in one year, or his loved one would have died). So this is my sticker shock I had to accept. It's not 1981 anymore. My memory of "what vets cost" was WAY off. So here's the thing I wish I had done faithfully, and you may want to consider it for yours if you want: I figure, at my income level, even if I just managed to put a thousand in a sock and never touched it, that would be admirable enough for someone like me to accomplish. And if I don't do it, and the cat dies, well then I'd be a crummy irresponsible pet owner. -because when they need a vet, it happens suddenly, the cash needs to just be there.
So this is a goal I'm working on right now. (If I finagle things right, I can get it done in three months, and feel better). I already bought him a new pet carrier - one that's cushy and large - and I put cardboard in the bottom and just leave it in the living room. He uses it for a little club house, which is just how we both need him to feel about it, because if it comes time he's gotta get in that thing and "take a ride", he wont fight me over it. (I found a really good one at Chewy.com. It's airline approved even. And it was on sale.)
Is a thousand a sufficient amount of cat health insurance? mm, no. But on my minuscule "fixed income" (no raises or ability to earn more), it'd be a lot better than nothing. And my plan kind of has to be that if he ever does need emergency services, we'll go to the low cost place, because all they require for proof that you're qualified for reduced price vet services is to show them a food card. And yup, I got an "EBT" card. :rolleyes2 (But hey, if you need it, you need it.) So I can get vet services at a greatly reduced price. I'd rather have a more normal income and ability, obviously. But at least I can get things done.
.
Okay this was too long. (Sorry!) And I didn't tell you all this because I decided you needed correcting in any way. I'm just passing on what I learned from these kind
people recently. BUT I WANTED TO POINT OUT THOUGH -that though I painted a scary picture of what vets can cost, you do realize if you saved $38.47 out of each
check (bi-weekly, right?), in two years you'd have a $2000 Vet fund stashed away. (And then you could keep saving that amount but make it for something else!
And I'm sure you know this stuff, and got a handle on things fine, but I didn't want to just state an intimidatingly large amount of money that my friend had
to pay, when his dog got essentially a tummy ache ($3200!!), without also pointing out that spreading the cost out over time can make it easy.
(Oh and if you do ever want to check out lower cost vet services in your area, the local animal shelter probably knows where they are.)
Give Puddin' a hug for us! And check out the rest of this forum and hang around with us too, if you want! It's a really good community
here. I've been at a lot of forums, this is the first one where I didn't get attacked over something I said right off the bat! They're nice
folks. And if you look around here, you'll see games and interesting conversations going on all the time. (And it'd be good, if you
became a regular, because then we could all keep up on how Puddin' is doing!
(Heck I may not even last, because I put too much effort into my posts and it's exhausting! lol But I will try. Cause I think it's a good
place, and I need people for if Captain Meow needs advice sometime. (lol *thinks of a good gag thread to start now* hmm...)
:rub:
and I'll really start with the biweekly saving a for both her and my dog. It'll come in handy
