This is a story, ultimately, about keeping your home tidy! I don't mean overly tidy but I do mean keeping stuff off the floor particularly threads of cotton or string which your cat might find attractive to chew and swallow. Domestic as do have a habit of eating stuff on the floor. It might be a dead fly or a bit of the fur that you have combed off your cat and it might just as well be some thread which for some reason or other ended up on the floor and you missed it.
The story tells me that cat owners simply must make sure that there are no threads lying around the floor in the home if you've got a cat or cats. Or make sure threads are inaccessible if they are somewhere else.
 |
| Orlando who ate a long thread that causes serious problems for cat and owner alike. Image: Orlando's owners. |
Orlando
In this story, a cat called Orlando (a quirky soul) living with a woman and her female partner in a multi-cat home in Sussex, UK managed somehow to ingest a very long black thread. Orlando's owners don't know how she got it or where it came from but it must have been inside their home. We don't know what their home looks like so I can't comment.
But once Orlando had eaten the thread everything went downhill from that point. Another unfortunate aspect of the story is that after Orlando became ill and stopped eating, they took her to the local veterinarian who gave her anti-sickness pill because she was being sick. The vet then sent her home. That obviously didn't fix the problem. Is that an example of poor veterinary service?
Test for foreign body?
Clearly the lesson there is that vets should by default check for foreign bodies which means doing some tests I am afraid. The tests would have been covered by the owners' pet health insurance policy.
The owners then took Orlando to another vet who did some blood tests. Neither veterinarian could see the thread that had gone right down into her intestines and perforated them in two places.
Orlando remained ill and was kept in by the second veterinary clinic who wisely did an ultrasound diagnosis and discovered the thread inside her body.
Read the insurance policy in full!
The next problem was this: Orlando's owners had a pet health insurance policy but it had a maximum expenditure of £4,000 a year. The operation to remove the thread, which in itself was life-threatening, and ancilliary care cost £7,000.
So, the owners are £3000 out of pocket. What did they do? They went online and set up a crowdfunding page to ask the public to give them £3000. I find that unacceptable myself. Begging the public for help when, on the face of it, the problem was careless cat ownership.
And if you can't afford to look after your cat properly then don't have cats. I am being tough but I don't think it is right to go to the public to help you pay for your cat's health expenses.
Orlando is recovering. As expected, as soon as the thread was removed, she started to improve although there was a short phase afterwards when she had a fever with a 40°C temperature and remained ill until the fever subsided.
One of the cat's owners is disabled and is cared for by her wife. They say that a lot of lovely people have donated to the fund and the veterinary clinic couldn't have been better.
Check the home for potential 'foreign bodies'
In this article I have focused upon the problem that caused all these other problem which is that a long thread was left somewhere within the house in a place where it was accessible to one of their cat namely Orlando. That's the error and it's a minor error I guess but it is one which caused major problems.
Every cat owner should go around the house and make sure that it is tidied up and that there are no threads of any shape, size or length within the home they can be accessed by a cat or cats.
The story is also a lesson about pet health insurance. The owners didn't know that their insurance policy had a £4000 limit. Nobody wants to read these horrible policy documents but you have to if you pay monthly insurance premiums which are not cheap because what's the point of having one if it doesn't cover the cost?
No comments:
Post a Comment