I talked to the vet again this afternoon.
Today it wasn’t about the revolting flea-encrusted dogs, but about poor little Guffy again, who is still as leaky as ever she was.
The vet suggested a steroid injection. Actually she said steroid tablets, but I have some considerable experience at trying to feed Guffy with tablets, and I can tell you that it is not a happy experience for either of us. I am experienced and adept at shoving tablets into recalcitrant animals, but it still took me some time to stop the bleeding after last time.
I demurred, quite forcefully after a while, and in the end the vet agreed that an injection might be possible, but added that she did not think it was necessarily a kindness to keep an animal alive if I had no intention of paying a thousand pounds for tests and potentially treatment for kidney failure, and that really we should start contemplating Guffy’s demise.
I said that Guffy, whilst not exactly the sort of animal you would wish to find sleeping in your bed because of her Little Problem, was not sick. She is perfectly happy and full of life, just misfortunately leaks poo all the time.
The vet said that obviously she must be in pain because she is leaking poo all the time, and that it would be cruel to allow her to carry on.
I suspect the vet’s opinion on the matter has been coloured by Guffy’s vet-avoidance tactic of pretending to be a corpse whenever we visit. The vet only has experience of a limp, self-pitying, tragic creature with her eyes rolled back up into her head. The Guffy of our house, the one who has left the small pile of defeated bees and spiders on the back doormat, and who hunts the dogs and hurtles from windowsill to flowerbed to compost heap as if unexpectedly fired from a small cannon, is a stranger to her.
I told Mark on the telephone, who agreed with me that Guffy is almost definitely in no pain whatsoever, and so there was no need to hasten her demise at the moment. He said that if he had thought even for a minute that she was suffering from anything worse than an occasional sore bottom, he would already have Done The Deed, and not to worry.
I was pleased about this. I am still hoping that she might get better.
The vet says that she won’t.
I have decided that this probably means it would not matter if we gave her the cheaper cat food. It is not very cheap cat food, it is almost the most expensive stuff on the market, but it is not the vet-recommended stuff which has to be specially ordered in tiny tins and costs so much that I think it must be manufactured from a blend of liquid gold and printer ink.
We will try the injection tomorrow. After that I think we will be staying away from the vet, just in case.
Apart from cleaning up after Guffy, which I do not bother telling you about because it does not make cheerful reading, and also because, like cleaning my teeth, it happens too often to be interesting, it has been a busy day. It is Monday, and so I have done Clean Sheets and hoovering and dusting. I trotted up and down the stairs, hurrying up as much as I could because I was absolutely longing to go up to the attic and carry on making curtains.
In the end I managed to get up there with about an hour of the day left to go, and became instantly and contentedly absorbed in measuring and pinning.
I was so engrossed that I jumped when the telephone rang, and then yelled with horror when I realised I was late for a taxi booking I had promised to do.
It was for a young chap I have known for years who has Made Good with his life and who was taking his girlfriend out for her birthday, so it was a wickedly neglectful forgetting.
I had to abandon the curtains then, and dashed down the stairs and into the taxi with as much haste as if I was Guffy taken short in the kitchen.
I have got to do cooking tomorrow, as well as taking Guffy to the vet, but there should still be some time left afterwards.
I will get on with them then.
