Fighting the Fate
"Will my cat live?"
The question haunted me for two fresh weeks not long ago. My cat Timmy was only three months old, and one day mom woke up and found him lying on the sofa with a high fever. I panicked. The last sick cat of mine had died. Was the same going to happen to him?
You might think, "this girl is weird! The cats needed a vet that's it." But no, that's NOT it. I'll tell you why.
I took my cat to the nearest hospital, which is the only public hospital and also the biggest one in Bangladesh (that's where I live). After seeing the cat for the first time (he had a fever of 105 degrees), the vet declared that he won't live. I was crestfallen. But then he said that he had a vaccine that he would inject, but all we could was pray!
"Just once? Don't we have to continue it or something?" I asked him.
"Do us, humans take medicine everyday?" he seemed to mock my words. I was so mad that I wanted to slap him hard across the face.
"Yeah, we don't. But we get a course of 5-7 days for each medicine." I replied. This made him think and after a moment he asked, "Can you bring him here tomorrow?"
I mentally slapped my forehead. So finally a student of Business Studies put the sense into a professional vet that the cat needed the medicine for more than one day!
Well the treatment continued for three days. On the third day, the doctor said that the condition of my cat was improving. When I smiled, he smiled along and said, "Why wouldn't it work? I gave him human medicine!"
I almost fell from my chair. I have read it in internet and in Yahoo! Answers that human medicine can be fatal to kittens, and this guy was doing the same with my cat for three days and I hadn't even known! I asked him why he did so and his reply was, "We don't have medicine for cats and dogs in our country. We only have them for cows and goats."
Yes, this is Bangladesh. This is where I live!
For the next few days I used to keep an eye on my cat, so much that I think he thought I was stalking him. I used to check his skin for rashes from side-effect of human vaccine, and even jerked him up from his sleep just to see if he was truly sleeping, not dead! But then he became healthy again after a while, and I heaved a sigh of relief. What had the doctor said? He won't live. I think they always say the same before treatment so that we don't blame him lest things should go wrong. Pathetic!
But the thing that I learned from that incident is to never, ever go to that hospital again. They keep prescribing human medicine to cats, and if I follow I'm sure I'll end up in jail for murdering all of my cats!
The reason for this post is- another of my kitten is very sick. His mother brought him a piece of raw beef from God knows where, which he ate happily and that was probably the last time he ate anything willingly. It's been a week. He's had diarrhoea (well, sort of, his stool is all white, same is for his vomit), and has stopped eating. I researched in the internet where I found that this may happen for worms, but I don't know where to take him, because I'm pretty much sure the vets in that hospital doesn't even know what 'Deworming' means. If they knew, they wouldn't ask us to feed them 'Metronidazole Benzoyate'-another human medicine, which is said to be fatal for them.
I tried force feeding with liquid food because he wouldn't eat solid ones. But today I found it in a site (and many others after that) that cats cannot digest cow's milk! There is a substitution recipe for their mother's milk, and it calls for 'evaporated milk' of which I have heard for the first time in my life. There is no such thing in our country. No KMR either. This godforsaken country doesn't have ANYTHING!
An hour ago I boiled a piece of chicken and mashed it with water and fed him a little. I hope he recovers soon. And if you read this, please keep my cat in your prayers. The way he's acting, I don't think he'll live long if he's not given enough and 'proper' food. If you read this post and have anything to suggest, feel free to leave a comment. :(
Long live my awesome country!
Update: My cat died the same night on which I wrote this post. May his soul rest in peace! Nothing more to say.
Image from internet.
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