How quickly things change.
Toby gave a weird, grating cry at about 11:40 this morning and then was floppy, unresponsive, and panting. I thought it sounded like a grand mal seizure cry. I hate being right sometimes. We rushed him to the vet, who gave up her Sunday afternoon and ran over to the clinic. He was comatose when we got him there. Dr. Colleen took an x-ray and a blood sample. He had peritonitis with secondary sepsis, and he was seizing and later comatose because his brain was affected. She told us he had about a 5% chance of survival. Since he had already beaten the odds a couple of times, we asked to try. We just couldn’t bear to give up until we were sure he had.
She went out to get the IV stuff ready and I told him he could go on to next world if he needed to go, but if he wanted to stay, he had to show us he was ready to fight.
She tried to hook him up to IV antibiotics, but his veins were too small, so she gave him an antibiotic shot and a dose of subcutaneous fluids. About 10 minutes later, he gave us the sign: he lurched to his feet, opened his eyes, and started trying to walk off the examining table. She was amazed. We were stunned.
She kept him for observation for a couple more hours. Because she is an angel in human form, she let me sit next to his kennel and have my hand on him as he slept on a heating pad under a towel. For awhile I was asleep with my arms and head in the kennel. At the end of the observation period, he ate wet food out of her hand (first time ever, the little stinker) and drank a little out of his bottle, so he was pronounced fit to go home for 24-hour home nursing care and her emergency number on speed dial.
He has antibiotic drops to take every 12 hours. He has subcutaneous fluids so I can inject them if he crashes again. He is to be fed every time he opens his eyes, and wakened every 2 hours to be fed if he sleeps that long. His official chances of surviving this ghastly infection are very low, but we are beginning to think we should have named him Han Solo. Never tell him the odds.
He is asleep on his snuggle disk between my arms as I write this.
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