Exhausted and Worried

Last night, the Friday night I'd been looking forward to with such anticipation, my plans for total relaxation were thwarted.  Midnight found us at the 24-hour emergency vet with Romeo...  we had started noticing that he was squatting and straining in his litter box, but not even producing one drop of urine.

The temptation to wait to take him to his regular vet during daylight hours was high:  after all, Romeo has been taken to the vet now on two different occasions for bladder issues, and both times we were told that it wasn't actually a blockage, but was related to stress.  And we all know from my recent posts that Romeo was under quite a bit of stress.  Eventually good sense won out though - we figured that NO urine produced couldn't mean anything good.  And something about his demeanor had me completely unsettled.  It was subtle - anyone with cats knows that it isn't that unusual for them to try to hide pain and illness from you.  But he didn't start purring immediately when I'd go over to pet him; in fact, he looked more annoyed than anything.  And his eyes weren't quite as bright as they had been.  We packed him up into the cat carrier and drove him to the nearest emergency vet, who we are sadly very familiar with.  We had hoped that it would be like the other times we've taken him him for bladder issues, and that we'd be sent back home and told that he was just having these issues due to stress and that it should clear up on its own.

Alas, this was not to be.  It was a good thing that we did take him in when we did.  As it turns out, he was blocked, and there were urinary crystals.

He is still at the hospital, on IV fluids and recovering from the blockage, catheterized until they're certain that he can pass urine on his own.  I don't know when he'll get to come home.  The vet said that an average stay is about 36 hours after the initial blockage is removed, so let's hope and pray that it is just an average stay.  Because of course I'm primarily concerned about Romeo's welfare, but from a pocketbook perspective as well, this is totally not what we needed.  We'll be fine - the estimate given to us was cringe-worthy, but not impossible for us to take on.  But there's nothing wrong with hoping that the final bill is on the lower side of the quoted estimate, right?

Anyway, I'm very worried about him.  I now think that last week's peeing on the floor incidents were an indication that something was wrong even then.  Though he DID start peeing in the box again once we got him upstairs, else he would have wound up at the vet sooner.   Maybe he was partially blocked then, and it all just came to a head last night?  Regardless, the vet's message this morning  (which must have been left when we were passed out cold from exhaustion during the wee hours of the morning) sounded confident that the crystals and the blockage were caught very early on, which is probably good news for Romeo.

Everyone keep paws and fingers and toes crossed for us!