Miss Elliot

Our lovely Miss Elliot (top left in photo) is in a bit of a pickle. The other night she came in, looking all bedraggled, dirty, ponging and unhappy. She was drooling and seemed to have difficulty eating and drinking. I imagined she´d been in a fight with another animale, perhaps, and decided to wait till the next morning to see, after she would have had a chance to clean herself up. Imagine my surprise,  when next morning she had not groomed herself at all, and was constantly sitting at the drinking bowl, inert and forlorn, frequently lapping water up with difficulty and spilling it all on the floor outside the bowl. She looked decidedly unhappy, poor thing. 

So, I decided veterinary attention was required, and called Yarrow (whose cat Miss Elliot is), and we trekked off to Willa,  our friend the vet,  in Ballina, who quickly diagnosed quite a serious condition, perhaps beyond remedy. We braced ourselves, uncomfortably recalling that last time we had a cat with a very serious (and expensive) condition, we agreed that in future we would not spend large sums of money to keep them alive. 

On first inspection, it looked as if Miss Elliot´s tongue was curled back against her esophagus, which would make it impossible for her to eat (swallow) or drink (lap up water). She was dehydrated and undernourished. Mind you, here is a cat who looked perfectly fine and fit as a fiddle until the day before. Just goes to show how quickly things can take a turn for the worst. The only ´unusual´ activity I could remember was that the day before she had slept on our bed all day, in exactly the same position, and that when I ´caught´ her in distress the night before she had been drooling. quite badly.  

A few hours later Willa had been able to ´put her under´ and take a closer look. She was quite confident that what had happened that Ms Elliot had had a pharyngeal abscess in her throat which had burst and had caused her tongue to get ´adhered´ to her pharynx.  The drooling must have been the abscess spilling out. Poor diddums.  Knowing how concerned cats are about personal hygiene, she must have been very aware of being unwell. 

Why the abscess was there, is anybody´s guess. Ms Elliot has been put on a drip to rehydrate and anti-biotics. If all goes well, she should be OK but we will know more by tomorrow. Her beautiful long hair has been shaved on her belly and inside legs, just to make her less conscious of her condition...