Cat Update

Ocs went for his follow-up appointment on Tuesday. Nothing new, just bloodwork to make sure things with his thyroid are moving in the right direction.

But I did have to talk to Dr. Kurpel about Felix. Ah, Felix. Felix continues to be an aggressive little bugger. On Sunday, while I was TRYING to wish my mom a happy happy Mother's Day, Fe decided to attack me. He was on the counter and I deigned to walked by him, and he decided it would be a great idea to "scratch" my eye. Now, I put that in quotation marks because he doesn't actually have his claws. Sometimes I feel bad about it, but on Sunday I was actually really happy about it because despite not having claws he still managed to hurt my eye. So I swatted him, he hissed, bared his teeth, used both paws to grab my arm and tried to bite me. So now I'm on the phone with Mom and I start crying - more out of shock and being startled/scared than anything else.

About ten minutes later, I'm still on the phone with her, and Ocs is sitting in the kitchen and Fe walks right by Ocs and just smacks the ever-loving crap out of poor Oscar! I was watching the whole thing - Oscar was literally just sitting there looking into the living room and Fe walked by, hissed, reared back, and walloped him.

Mom told me to put Fe in jail, so I did, and I decided that when I took Oscar in to see Dr. Kurpel, I would talk to her about Fe's aggressive behaviour not getting any better and, in fact, getting a bit worse. Mom thinks this is because I have befriended a cat who is up for adoption at Baltimore Pet Shoppe (local friends in need of a cat - adopt Speedy!).

I talked to Dr. Kurpel, and she recommended that I try Feliway, a cat pheromone diffuser since I'm going away next week for two weeks. Although Felix knows (quite well) the two people who will be cat-sitting, it will still be a change in the schedule, and if the Feliway is going to work, we want it to start working now. If it doesn't work, she wants to do a blood panel on him just to make sure that he doesn't have some underlying kidney, liver, etc., issue that's causing him physical discomfort that makes him act out aggressively. If it isn't physical, then we're going to put him on Prozac. This will mean checking his liver enzymes every once in awhile (blood work on both cats - yay!), but at least I won't have a cat who is attacking my other cat.

My main concern was that Fe happy and not attacking Ocs and that I not be scared to have friends touch Felix, and Dr. Kurpel's concern was that I be happy cat owner. By the time I got home, she had emailed some links with information on cat behaviour, and some information on cat behavioural specialists at Penn Vet (yeah, cause that sounds affordable), but said she would be happy to work with me if that didn't seem like something I wanted to do (whew).

I got the Feliway yesterday, along with a new cat toy for Felix (and I MAY have played with Speedy for awhile while I was at the Pet Shoppe anyway).

Wish us luck!