Jon Snow's Wild Medical Weekend
Content Warning: This post contains discussion of a cat having a medical emergency; I don't want to take away from the impact but as of this writing, the cat is safe and back home.
F riday evening, I was sitting down with a bowl of popcorn to watch Char's Counterattack - we've been going through the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise in release order (rewatches for me, first time for our eldest kid) and after about a year of casual watching, we'd reached the culmination of Char's story.
For those who haven't seen it I won't spoil, but there are some iconic moments with the film's ancillary characters that set the stage for future events in the franchise's Universal Century setting. About ten seconds before the scene, one of our cats (who was resting on the floor in front of us) tried to get up but stumbled - then tried tried to slide himself across the floor only using his front paws.
My panic set in when I got to him and realized that not only was he having difficulty breathing, he had no control over his back legs, and they were cold to the touch.
In 2016, Della and I found our first litter of 5 kittens. They were a group of newborns hidden in a bush (on Easter Sunday of all things lmfao). Many have called this the fixed point where the kitten portal opened and set our destiny to forever find and home cats - but before the dust had even settled with these 5, we found a sixth kitten from a different litter.
Now - you need to understand that it was 2016, Game of Thrones was in the zeitgeist and the writers hadn't yet fully revealed that they had no idea what they were doing. Five cats, with a sixth cat that had different parents - we naturally named this little guy Jon Snow. (Winning out against Ezio since he literally has the Assassin's Creed logo on his face).
I t's been challenging getting standard vet appointments for all of the cats in our new home. Personnel shortages often mean that "I just want a regular checkup" is sometimes 4-5 months out. We're lucky in that we have a great urgent care center within 30 minutes but they aren't open after-hours, so we took him to the one 24-hour place within reasonable distance from us.
Pleased to say, they didn't fuck around.
I've not had particularly good experiences with emergency vets in my time taking care of animals; some situations significantly more traumatizing than others, but for the most part every vet ER I've ever been to involved a long wait in a lobby before anyone even looked at the animal.
This place triaged him and stabilized him immediately when we got inside, and it wasn't that long of a wait before the vet came in to talk about his condition. He was not in great shape, and given his vitals we were most likely looking at a 3-5 day hospitalization.
This tiny kitten Jon Snow looked fake. Something about his small size and his fur texture gave him the appearance of a stuffed animal compared to the other 5 kittens.
The night we found him, his parent was trying to relocate him and two littermates in a rainstorm. Mr. Snow was left behind and the other two, a tortie and a calico, were dragged off into the night. The tortie showed up again a few weeks later and we were able to take her in as well. Because Della'd just read a news story about a woman who had a bison in her home as a pet and we were getting surrounded by animals, Bison became said tortie's name. The calico kitten mostly disappeared from the story for the next eight months outside of a few spottings.
Earlier, I said 'parent' because for a long time we thought this was the mother cat (A large, black and and white feral) but it turned out to be his father - a beast we then later named Rhaegar once we'd gotten the family tree correct working with some other neighbors involved in the kitten TNR programs; Jon Snow's mother turned out to be the small, black feral we'd been trying to trap for nearly a year - but she was so small she'd been stepping over the safetrap's mechanism to get to the food inside.
To make an already tangented long story short: with two weeks left to go in Northern California before we were set to move to the desert (and take all the cats with us) both the calico (Lilith) and the mother (Cutie) ended up in our safetraps. The family had a reunion, and weirdly - they all recognized each other. I'll never forget Lilith smelling Jon Snow and Bison and twining tails with them.
Jon Snow the kitten evolved rapidly into a large beast; hulking bulldog shoulders, highest weight (predominantly in muscle) of the entire colony - he's a positively seussian creature of odd proportions. He sleeps with his paws outstretched. He loves chest scritches but not belly. His meow crackles like a warm fire.
Despite his bulk, he remained an absolute sweetheart.
And he loves Della.
When she's sick in bed, if I walk into the room to talk to her he drops what he's doing to climb on her chest and announce that he's jealous of her talking to someone else. Definitely adorable in a "would be a problem if he were a human" kind of way.
All of us in the house have cats that have bonded with us deeply 1:1, and Jon Snow is definitely closest to her.
Y ou know the thing about how people look like their pets or start to have things in common? We don't do anything half-assed in this household. I was born with heart problems, Della has neurological issues and a family history of diabetes. So we were (not) shocked to learn that not only does Mr. Snow have diabetes, he's also got heart disease that no one ever caught in earlier tests or checkups.
A dislodged blot clot is what knocked out his legs. Miraculously, (and most likely because we got him to the ER in time) over the course of hospitalization it resolved itself and he's got full range of motion back.
After two full days in the vet hospital, he was deemed safe to be discharged and now begins the ongoing care, which consists of:
Four medications in pill form, three of which are twice a day, in addition to insulin injections and regular blood tests. His brother Sparkle was diagnosed with diabetes back in July so we already have an insulin ritual, but adding all of the pills on top is a bit of mayhem.
And we're not delusional; a cat with diabetes will have a shorter lifespan, a cat with heart disease even less so. He's already 8 and a half. But right now, he's home - he's loved, and he's as healthy as he can be and hey - if nothing else, we learned that he has a heart shape on his belly skin we never would have seen had he not been shaved for medical tests:
Despite it all, he started purring the moment I brought him in the house. He knows he's home and safe.