My poor cat. My big adventure yesterday was his first trip to the vet. And yes, blah, blah, I've had him for a year and a half, how could I be so cruel as for it to be my first trip to the vet with him... Okay, lets just take as given how horrible a person I am and move on. He's been having various troubles with his mouth for a little while, including utterly freaking out whenever you try to get close and see it or something similar, so I took him in. The vet checked him out, and said "well, he has really severe gingivitis and a secondary infection in the lymph nodes in his neck."

The vet, of course, could not get the cat to open his mouth, so we were not able to look for a cause to the inflammation and infection. Not that I blame him - he had enough fresh scratch-marks on his hands from other pets that day, and Boggart isn't exactly helpful about your getting in to his mouth.

The vet then was talking about FLV and FIV, because - apparently - feline leukemia and feline immunodeficiency disease (or "feline aids", as the vet - but not the assistant - called it) are the two most common causes of a severe mouth infection. And I, of course, hadn't been able to find his immunization records before taking him in, so we had him tested. The test came back negative for both, thank god; but that left us with little more than a mystery and a bill.

So now my cat is on oral antibiotics twice a day (yeah, lets try and imagine how much fun *that* is with a cat who doesn't want someone touching their gums?), and I'm supposed to be away for two days this weekend, and my roommate won't do the antibiotics while I'm gone. And the vet "strongly suggested" anesthetising the cat and getting his teeth cleaned, which I can't afford right now either way. And he's pissed, because last night and this morning I caught him, wrapped him tightly in a blanket, and then fought him for 15 minutes to get 1 ml of apparently-bad-tasting-liquid down his throat.

*sighs*

Time to call the vet and find out if it needs to be a consistent course, or if he can miss Saturday's two and Sunday morning's. Depending on that, I'll figure it out. Just frustrating.

Oh. This is the vet where Elendil was put down, a couple of weeks back; and apparently they only had one vet on duty, and it was busy. So I spent almost an hour and a half in the room where Elendil was killed. *That* did not put me in the best of moods. I should have just asked to be moved.