The other day, I was concerned about Cosmo's breathing; it seemed
worse to me than normal.  He has CRF and a heart murmur and is on
Lasix.  He also has ear trouble regularly.

Luckily, a friend called, and I had a ride to the vet.  I was also
concerned about Internet, who has an enlarged heart and asthma, who
has been having chronic diarrhea of late and also ear  problems.  And
then Arthur needed a claw trim (he and Cosmo are the two that I cannot
do, as they act like I am killing them if I try!) and a prescription
for his asthma pills.

So we loaded them into the van and trucked off to TED.

Turns out the ear stuff is just chronic wax buildup that older cats
sometimes get.  So I get to squirt the blue stuff in their ears once a
week and rub rub rub!  Cosmo's breathing they didn't think was that
bad, and suggested what I was already going to do, which was up
Cosmo's Lasix back to one pill twice a day instead of half a pill
twice a day and see if that does it.  They gave me a bottle of 100
pred that I'll use for both Arthur and Internet, and I'm upping
Arthur's pred (his breathing was actually worse than Cosmo's) back to
the 1/2 every day that he was on until I tried to wean him off to a
lesser amount.  And Internet gets to take some tummy antibiotics for a
week.  I guess it's one of those pills that tastes terrible; I gave
his dose to him yesterday, and he is terrible about swallowiing pills,
so it got stuck in his mouth and melted.  Next thing I knew, he's
running around foaming at the mouth and drooling everywhere. It would
have been funny if I didn't feel bad for him!  I grabbed treats to
help get the taste out of his mouth, and that helped.

Otherwise, Cosmo has great teeth for a cat his age (16), Arthur's
teeth are great, and, as the vet joked, Internet's teeth are in
perfect shape (Internet *has* no teeth!).

Arthur and Cosmo now have trimmed claws to boot, so Arthur can crawl
up on my shoulder again, which he loves to do and has been banned from
until he got his claws trimmed.

So glad there doesn't seem to be anything terribly wrong (that we
don't already know about) with the babies.  Just management of
existing conditions and meds for the most part.

Ginger-lyn
still out of it and babbling on way too much
Home Pages:
 http://www.moonsummer.com
 http://www.angelfire.com/folk/glsummer (homepage & cats)
 http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~summer/index.htm (genealogy)
 http://www.movieanimals.bravehost.com/ (The Violence Against
                        Animals in Movies Website)