A Spore Excuse for a Joke

So I took my cat to a veterinary dermatologist because it had bald spots and was shedding hair all over the place. I asked the vet if the cat would would get better, but she said she didn’t want to make any rash promises.

Satan’s Little Fart Cloud has yet to figure out that she can’t hide from the nasty yellow bath. She has figured out how to postpone it for as long as possible though. Ever had to extract a cat from behind a toilet? You get down on your hands and knees on one side, and the cat slinks behind the toilet and hides on the other side.

Anybody out there see “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”? Remember how to find a ‘Toon? Just sing “Shave and a Haircut”. The ‘Toon will be forced out of hiding because he won’t be able to control singing back “Two Bits”.

Well, SLFC is Roger Rabbit, and my version of “Shave and a Haircut” is a jar of Pounce cat treats. Just call me “Judge Doom.” SLFC becomes a study in approach/avoidance response when she’s hiding behind the toilet and I shake a jar of Pounce. She wants the treats. She starts to come out from behind the toilet, and then remembers what awaits her if she caves. She returns under the tank, but her gaze never wavers from the jar. If I toss a Pounce next to the toilet she stretches out as far as possible to score it. Once that first Pounce has been eaten, it apparently affects the synapses in the brain that control rational thought. Cats only have a few of those synapses to begin with, so it doesn’t take a very big dose of Pounce to make SLFC completely forget why she’s hiding behind the Porcelain Throne.

SLFC has developed no such aversion to the carrier. In a plot twist that I find intriguing, the carrier, which was once Public Enemy Number One when grey cats were free to roam the land, has become quite popular. I bring the carrier down, I open the door, and SLFC strolls right in. The only reason I can come up with is that she’s so desperate to get out of quarantine that even the cat carrier looks good.

This partly explains why Smelly Cat enjoyed our outing to the Veterinary Dermatologist on Friday. She handled it well, with none of that pathetic mewing and scrabbling at the carrier door that had formerly been a trademark traveling pass-time of hers. It’s a good thing she handles traveling in the carrier so well now, because we waited until 4:15 for our 3:30 appointment.

The waiting room at the Vet Specialty Hospital was better appointed than some human hospitals I’ve been to, spacious as a theater with little subdivisions furnished with modular-type sofas upholstered in fabric that had a repeating stylized dog’s head motif. The magazines were current, and a huge wide-screen at one end of the room kept up a constant white noise of CNN and commercials. A tropical fish tank was across the way from the television; in better times I would have carried SLFC over to see the fish but with her current contagion it seemed prudent to just stake out a spot in an out-of-the-way nook and wait to be called.

I liked the dermatologist we saw, and we had a good discussion on where to go from here. A quick summary:

• The dermatologist feels that budesonide is affecting LGFC’s immune system, even though conventional wisdom says it only acts in the GI tract and doesn’t go systemic. Based on empirical evidence I’d have to agree. She needs the Budesonide for her triaditis, but we’ve cut it in half, down to one mg/day.
• It’s fairly obvious that the current anti-fungal drug SLFC is on, fluconazole, isn’t cutting the mustard. Hell, the stuff has made friends with the fungus and is now happily bedded down in the same hair follicles with it. For all I know, fluconazole and M. canis are currently sharing a hyphonated last name and picking out china patterns. As much as I’ve been trying to stay away from the high end/high price drugs, it’s gotten to a point that I’m being penny-wise and pound-foolish. We’ll be moving SLFC to brand name Itraconazole (Sporanox) as soon as I can get the script filled. Sporanox is expensive – the cheapest source I could find on short notice can give me ten 10mg capsules for about $132.00. I have to open the capsules and divide the contents into threes, then serve the little pellets to SLFC in butter. The drug will end up costing me about $4.40/day plus the price of sweet butter.
• In human medicine, dermatologists rely heavily on creams, salves and ointments. In veterinary medicine the big dermatological crutch is restrictive diets. Because SLFC has triaditis, and since part of her problem may possibly be compounded by food allergies (which she’s never been diagnosed with) the dermatologist wants to start her on a ZD diet. ZD is a prescription pet food formulated to have very short chain proteins in it. The shorter the protein, the less likely it is to cause an allergic reaction. If there is an allergic component to the problem, the new diet should help resolve it. They were good enough to give me a case of ZD free, with a coupon for another case if Fart Cloud will eat the stuff (to say that this food is not universally beloved among pets would be an understatement). So far she’s slurping the stuff up (literally – it reminds me of a thick meat gelatin).
• The dermatologist suggested that I might want to consider treating all cats in the household, since one of the others might be an asymptomatic carrier. Here is where I drew the line; bathing one cat every three days is bad enough, but there ain’t no way in Satan’s Little Fart Cloud Hell that I’m bathing four cats, especially a warrior who is closing in rapidly on her twentieth birthday and has no sense of humor (the same Warrior Princess who sent me to the emergency room with a bite wound after I tried to comb her a year or so ago). I negotiated with the dermatologist, pointing out that neither The Prof nor I had any ringworm lesions after SLFC went into quarantine, and that we had a canary in our cave: if one of the cats were a carrier the our 20 year old immune-depressed senior citizen would almost certainly be exhibiting lesions. I won the battle (at least temporarily) but the possibility (i.e. nightmare scenario) still lingers in the wings.
• Interestingly, at no time was shaving ever brought up as a possibility. I remember going over the pros and cons of shaving a ringworm animal while I was in school, but it seems in modern practice the cons have now clearly won. I was actually prepared to do this to the Little Fart Cloud, but I guess she’s safe from now.

So that’s where we stand now. SLFC has new lesions on the back of both hind legs, and the scourge has now extended into her front right paw. Her tail is rapidly being denuded, and the bathroom/quarantine room is full of hair every morning before I dry mop, wet mop and bleach. The new drug arrives on Tuesday, so keep your fingers crossed boys and girls.