I’d noticed my cat straining in the litter box around 11am Tuesday morning. I thought he was constipated so I broke out the canned food and olive oil. He kept going into the litter box trying so hard and so often that he’d actually laid outside of the box napping there between bouts.
I made a vet visit for the next morning, but when my boyfriend got home Tuesday between 5 and 530 pm, he touched Tom’s belly and Tom screamed and ran right to the litter box and stayed in there another 10 minutes. Boyfriend insisted he go to the hospital. I drove out to Rockville in the rain after dark to get him there and they told me his bladder was full.
They said he had an obstruction and needed to be catheterized and that he wasn’t coming home with me. The tech asked if I wanted to say goodnight to him so I had her bring him in from the back for about five minutes. I would have held him all night but he needed to get treatment started.
I called them around 9pm and then again at 1 am. By 1 they said they had got the catheter in and had cleared the obstruction. I didn’t want to visit him and get him stirred up, but the next morning the boyfriend and I went to give him his medication.
It was awful. He stank of urine and had both arms shaved, one with an iv in it. The catheter was hooked up between his legs and he was wearing a cone. He was so stressed out he wondered why we were keeping him there and he decided to crush his head into my hands inside of the cone, trying to comfort himself. I only stayed long enough for him to calm down for a minute or so and get him to eat his pill pocket, then I called the tech back in to take him back to acclimate in his new surroundings. We stayed about five minutes.
They said his catheter should be removed around ten pm and we may be able to collect him around midnight.
I called at 12:00am and they told me his catheter had clogged again and he wasn’t going to have it removed until at least 4am. Between 9 and 10 the next morning we were heading back to the hospital to give him his meds again, and I phoned on the way.
They said we could take him home.
It was urethral obstruction secondary to FLUTD. And its was almost $2100.
If I hadn’t taken him in that evening, we could have been dead by morning.
We were sent home with pain meds and an anti spasm medication.

When he got home he couldn’t control his urine flow. He ran right to the litter box and stayed in there for 10 minutes again while he’d trickle. We got him out and he laid down and started trying to clean himself, while the urine was still trickling all over himself. We confined him to the dining room and I spent all afternoon in there. He was in the box every ten minutes until he’d finally give up and take a nap, and the irritation slowly started to subside. We set out dirty guinea pig laundry for him to lie around and get comfortable with a familiar smell. He loves his guinea pigs.
By the evening I was comfortable enough with his improved condition that I let him into the bedroom to hang out and eventually go to bed. He was of course bathed beforehand.

It’s been a few days now, and he acts like he was never sick. He’s been taking his medication well, loving on me quite a bit, hanging out with his guinea pigs, and eating wet food. Pain in my wallet is that Stewart would try to bully him for the food, so I have to do wet food for both of them.

So that happened. And he’s only 7. And he drinks from the water fountain and pees like a horse all the time, but still managed to develop struvite crystals when he was clear of them three months ago on a check up. And I was in the position at the time of the estimate, to feel what it’s like to have to let your pet go. It was between $2200-2900 and I’m thinking to myself I can’t afford it even though I had enough credit available. Something like this could be the end of my baby boy. Because he was going under general anesthesia, they also got to mess with my heart strings because I got to sign a resuscitation order that if something went wrong, try to do what you can to bring him back.

I’m on alert. This sucks.
If you find typos in this I’ll worry about it later.