Wednesday went to the vet today. For several months she has had blood in her urine and sometimes makes frequent stops in the litter box. We’ve taken her in for a urinalysis three times, and no signs of infection other than the blood were found. The first two times antibiotics were prescribed. When she still had the same symptoms after the second course of antibiotics, and the third UA showed no bacteria again, just the blood, the vet said to just watch it and not worry about it. This didn’t sound right…four months or more of bloody urine, no infection, and she plucks all the hair out in her belly area. SOMETHING is going on, and Joy’s fear was bladder stones.

We decided to go for a second opinion and decided to take her to a clinic someone had recommended. When we tried to book the appointment and explained what it was for, however, we were told that the charge for a ‘second opinion exam’ was twice the regular exam price. I’m still trying to figure out the logic of that. We opted to try another clinic a former coworker of Joy’s had recommended. Well, there’s another clinic we won’t be going back to.

OK, messy things happen at animal clinics so there are sometimes smells. But what assailed our nostrils when we came through the door was …umm…lets just say a ‘human’ waste smell. Maybe their restroom was near the front of the clinic. Maybe someone was having some digestive disturbances. Regardless it was pretty potent. We found other things a bit unsettling, like the stuffed cat figure on the shelf made out of REAL fur…rabbit and not cat I assume, but kinda creepy, as was the giant cowboy painting of a group of trappers leading horses weighed down with skinned hides and antlers. Well, we were already there so we made the best of it.

The vet seemed nice, immediately recommended an X-ray which is what we’d hoped for. Showed us the film and Lo and behold, there were the bladder stones Joy had suspected, two of them the size of peas. But two things bothered us; one was that she told us Hills CD-O (O’ for oxalate stones, as Wednesday had oxalate crystals on one of the three UAs) would disolve the stones. That didn’t sound right to us (as far as we knew, only Hills SD disolves stones and that is for Struvite not Oxalate) and she called us later to correct herself…but a vet should know that stuff. The other thing is maybe a little nit-picky…when she first came into the room, reading the chart, she looked at us and said “a dilute calico, huh?” and kind of laughed. We weren’t sure what she meant, and later realized that apparently she assumed this was some whimsical description we had made up, as opposed to the term used for a calico that is also a blue dilute. She wasn’t laughing in a mean way…and so maybe not everyone is as particular as us about using correct color terminology, but again you’d think a VET would have heard of a dilute calico.

So now we had a NEW dilemma: a cat that needs surgery and two clinics we don’t want to go back to…

There is a clinic just up the street from us where Joy gets some prescription food that most vets don’t carry. They always seem very nice there and I don’t know why we didn’t just try them sooner, but anyway Joy called them for a quote on the surgery and the Dr. himself called her back. He explained everything in detail, the price was very reasonable, and he seemed very nice. Wednesday’s bladder surgery is on the 16th. I sure hope everything goes OK.