the last couple of days have been stressful. rogue, my stray kitten (we still call her kitten because up until recently, she's been the youngest and lightest: she's now 7 and weighs about 10 pounds, lol), had an eye infection and puffy mouth last week. i kept the eye cleaned and watched the mouth, and things seemed to clear up. she even ate a little. then monday she stopped eating entirely, stopped drinking water, and got more sluggish. i admit it: i panicked. after vagner, i just couldn't bear to lose another cat so soon. unfortunately, an emergency care visit yielded nothing more than she wasn't in life threatening danger as far as they could tell. we took her to the regular vet the next day, and i'm thinking the e.r. vet didn't do a very good check: temp was up, there was sign of infected bites, and they found a lump in her mouth. she stayed overnight, they did some dental cleaning and some other tests. the good news is the lump was an inflamed lymph node, but her bp was too high, and her bilirubin indicated liver issues (that may well have been or be part of the not eating thing since a cat's liver will attempt to support a cat that's not eating).
she's home now, eating a little bit on her own and a little bit by syringe, using the cat box, and managed just a little water. she's on antibiotics, a bp med, and an appetite promoter. she's still not feeling well, but her prognosis is good.
the financial end of things, however, goes beyond ouch. we've put out somewhere around $450 to pay for her care (granted, better than the $1100 it would have been without some finagling on the part of the vet, though that finagling now has us with a new monthly bill of $70 *sighs*). saxy's father has paid $150 of that, which means nearly every dime of hub's paycheck today is going to vet care. we have nothing for food or gas until next week. all the bills i had planned to pay are pushed aside as well, which makes the next check even tighter as i reshuffle to make it all work.
the tax return has also been impacted, because you know wee can't make plans for a tax return without them imploding. we'll still pick up our dragon con tickets, but my clothes are eighty-sixed, and the laptop will have to be a make do for another two years number rather than the one i wanted. instead, we'll be catching up the car payments and putting a bug chunk on more vet bills.
because we have two more cats with mouth issues. gambit is over-salivating and can't seem to eat hard food at the moment. ororo looks to have something stuck in her teeth. we are suspecting that we picked up a bad bag of food when we picked up some emergency 9-lives to cover the cats until payday.
yea, not buying cheap ass food again, if we can help it.
we have two others, logan and a new kitten, shadowcat pryde (a little boy named after x-men's kitty pryde), who need check ups, but check ups will have to wait. we're looking at $2000 just to cover the mouth issues.
but in the mean time, money for food and tp and other necessities (including cat food) is going to be next to nonexistent. and i suspect at least one of the checks for the vets is going to bounce, so the tax money will need to cover bounce fees. the one saving grace is that the checks are written on the joint account, so as long as i can get us to tuesday, i can use linnorm's money for kiddo for food and gas until the tax money shows and the next paycheck, both due towards the end of next week. between now and then, scary time. scraping time. we need some basics, hubs needs gas money, and it's just not there. which is why at least one check may bounce: people gotta eat. hubs has got to get to work. plus we had to use some of the money that was already in there. i'm thinking the first 2 checks are covered, the 3rd is destined to bounce.
we'll roll with it, and things will even out, it's just for now, it's looking a lot like the struggle to get back on our feet from a few years ago. had hoped not to revisit that any time soon, but hopefully this is short term. a rough week is better than rough months or years. |
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