Poor Boop

I feel like the worst foster mom ever.

The cats all had colds, and all got put on medication. Neville, original bringer of the communal cold, is doing great now and running around the house trying to beat everyone else up and generally getting into trouble.

Mrs. O'Hara, who got her cold from Neville, has fully recovered and has decided that she will be an exclusively upstairs cat. That's her domain, and she's perfectly content to stay up there. (She doesn't like the dogs.)

Betty. Poor little Betty. She's been sort of "off" for almost a week now, but it was not really anything that we could put our finger on. She didn't fully recover from the cat cold and kept getting a bit of a goopy eye, but we had put her through her round of medication and were hoping it would just go away. It didn't really, and then we started to notice that she was just not herself.

We kept an eye on her as she wandered through the house, walking more and more slowly each day. Then she stopped wandering around and just stayed in the cat room. Occasionally she would pick up a foot as though it was hurting her, but she did it with different feet, so we didn't know what to make of that. I squeezed and manipulated all her legs and she didn't seem to care that much, so I didn't think it was a twisted ankle or anything like that.

Then she decided that she only wanted to be under the bed in the cat room, so she didn't come out. She didn't feel like being petted, and didn't show any interest in us or in the other cats - this was not Betty-like behaviour.

Feeling like an idiot, I called the vet yesterday morning and told them that Betty seemed unhappy and uncomfortable. What else could I say? We brought her in and the vet examined her, and then asked us to leave her there for x-rays. When I called back later in the day they told me that they had hooked her up to an I.V. and were going to keep her overnight. They suspected that she had Pneumonia. The x-rays came back clear though, which means she just has a bad cold. Can you call it the flu if a cat has it?

Poor little Betty Boop! We're hoping she bounces back from this quickly now that she's on beefed up medication.

Also, I have recently been expecting spring but what has been provided instead is bitterly cold weather.

At least the weekend's almost here.