Post-Surgical Kuro-kun

[tiggymalvern]

Kuro is my cat who had major oral surgery five days ago to remove a tumour in his jaw. He has a shaved leg from his catheter for his anaesthesia. He also has a feeding tube in his neck.




We are feeding him liquid food through the tube five times a day because he can't eat yet. As you can see, he finds the process of being fed via a tube very traumatic.



It takes about half an hour from start to finish, with blending up the liquid and feeding him slowly over about 20 minutes (you wouldn't want your stomach to go from empty to full in 30 seconds either!) and then rinsing out the syringes and everything afterwards. So yes, we're spending about two and a half hours every day feeding the cat right now...

He was very quiet the first few days, but now he's back to playing with catnip mouse in the sun 😊



Between biopsies and CT scans and oncology and surgical consults, this is pretty much why I've got nothing fannish done this past month!

Comments

[tiggymalvern]

Yeah, patients like that can be really hard to work with, and sometimes we're just limited in what we can do for them. It's a compromise between trying to fix the pet and how much distress you cause them by doing it :-(

I wouldn't have gone for the surgical option with Kuro except we already know the tumour is benign, so assuming we got it all out, it's gone forever. If we'd left it, it would have kept on growing and caused him ever-worsening mouth pain over a prolonged period, so it seemed worth the two weeks of tube feeding to be rid of it.

[dreamerinsilico]

Yeah, that entirely makes sense.

Mjowlnir, by the best guess of the people I adopted her from, was born/spent most early months of kittenhood as a stray, and while she's quite well-behaved (and sociable!) as long as no one is trying to Trap Her In A Box (or do other things that involve being Trapped), I think the lack of early acclimation to things like being held and put in a carrier is why she's always been SO resistant to it. And she's strong as hell, which doesn't help matters. (She loves to sit or lie on/against Favored Humans, but only! at! her! own! fluffy! discretion!!!)

[tiggymalvern]

Have you tried the trick of leaving the cat carrier out in the house all the time so it just becomes part of the standard furnishings? We have two carriers, one for single cat transport and one that fits both at once when they're going to the cattery or wherever, and both cats go into them voluntarily when they're playing or looking for somewhere quiet to sleep. So they don't mind at all when we grab them and put them in there.

Spraying Feliway or Comfort Zone inside the carrier can help too, but if the cat is frantic from the start, it's not going to do enough.

[dreamerinsilico]

Yeah, I've tried it more than once for months and months at a time (and the first time, she actually did go in voluntarily every so-often), but no dice. She knows that when I try to put her in there or lure her in with food that the door's going to be shut and then she'll be Trapped. However, I've never used any of the scent type things in there, so that might be worth trying, maybe with a brand-new carrier she doesn't have any terrible memories about yet?

[tiggymalvern]

You could try it with a new carrier. You could also try feeding her regularly inside the carrier so that luring her in there with food becomes normal and not just something that happens when she's going to be shut in. Maybe associating the carrier with something positive would work.

[dreamerinsilico]

Maybe! Thank you, I think I will try that. I don't have to move her around often, thankfully, but it's such a massive undertaking when I do that I'd really like to change it.