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a look inside Oscar's mouth
Thursday, December 7 2023
Late this morning I stuffed Oscar the Cat into a cat carrier and then we loaded up both dogs into the car and drove to the Hurley Vet. Charlotte was just riding along, though both Oscar and Neville had appointments with the vet. When we got entered the waiting room, there was another pit bull there who looked a lot like Neville, though she was bigger and suffering (we learned later) from bone cancer. Charlotte has been fairly bad with unknown dogs, but she genuinely seemed to want to play with this unknown dog, perhaps only because she resembled Neville.
Meanwhile, Oscar had been so upset about being in the cat carrier that he'd both shit and vomited into it, creating a horrendous smell. Thankfully, this was all taken care of by one of the vet techs.
The reason we'd taken Oscar to the vet was so a professional could look inside his mouth and tell us what the hell is going on in there. Back in March, we'd had a bunch of his bad teeth extracted, and the vet at the time (one connected with one of the big pet store chains, either PetSmart or Petco) had told us that Oscar has an immune system condition where his body attacks his teeth and that they'd probably all have to come out eventually. We'd kicked the can down the road, of course, and now Oscar had started drooling from one of the corners of his mouth. The vet looked in there and didn't like what she saw, describing the gums as looking like hamburger and some of the teeth as blackened by decay. The simplest solution, she thought, was to inject Oscar with a steroid to counteract his overly aggressive immune system. He's an old cat and putting him through the trauma of extracting his remaining teeth might not even solve his problem, but a steroid might at least give him some comfort. So we opted for that. As for Neville, the main reason we had him there was so a blood draw could be extracted to see if his thyroid and other levels were good. He's been on a thyroid medicine for many months now, and we weren't sure it was actually justified.
While there, we also had Neville's claws trimmed, as he no longer gets enough exercise (even with his new energetic sister) to wear them down.
I spent much of the rest of the day working on that spec web development project for my old boss Alex, since we'd be having a meeting about it tomorrow and I wanted to show some progress. I'd taken some pseudoephedrine to help with that (as well as to suppress some of my annoying post-covid snot issues), and this time it actually seemed to help give me the necessary mental focus.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?231207 feedback
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