Agatha-cat had a rather unpleasant evening yesterday, though all eventually turned out OK. She'd been throwing up part of her dinner the last few days, usually a sign of hairballs, but I'd been a bad cat mommy and hadn't started force-feeding the hairball goop. So when she threw up yesterday evening, I didn't really worry. And then it happened again, and again, and again--just fluid, of course, but it didn't stop. And then she started straining out of the litter box, and started to cry at me. Brushing her calmed her for a while, but she'd cry when I stopped, which is not at all typical for her. The throwing up was most worrisome, as she has kidney disease and can't be allowed to get dehydrated.

So I put her in the carrier and off we went to the emergency vet clinic around 9 PM. Lots of people there, so we had quite a wait, first for a room, then for a vet tech to take a history and vitals, then for the vet herself. Actually the wait was reassuring--the woman whose dog was taken straight back after she spoke to the receptionist clearly had an emergency, but Agatha's condition wasn't so critical. After the tech had come and gone, I picked up Agatha off the cold examining table and we sat together on a seat for 30 minutes or so waiting for the vet. The Clie with the scroll wheel for one-handed reading (Curse of Chalion), the other hand for petting the cat, and the wait wasn't bad.

Anyway, the upshot was bad constipation, apparently not uncommon with kidney disease where the cat is prone to get dehydrated. They did a lab test to be sure the kidneys were indeed functioning OK, then they gave her a stool softener, an enema, and expressed her anal glands while they were at it. We got home with an antibiotic for the next week (the anal glands showed some signs of infection) a little before midnight. She's finally starting to eat a little and seem more like herself, so I'm feeling that we got through this one.