Well, this morning we thought we were making the final trip to the vet with Mayhem. We woke to find he’d gone blind in his right eye, and was already blind in his left. Add to that having gone deaf a few months ago, advanced decrepitude, and excessive vocalizations. It didn’t look good.
The vet even walked into the room with the fatal syringe, or so Deb reported.
But the vet looked into his right eye, pronounced that, unlike the blindness in his left eye, which is mysterious, his right eye clearly has a detached retina, which she said often happens in response to hypertension aka high blood pressure. I didn’t know that.
And she had noticed, from two or three weeks ago when we brought him, that the attempt to take his blood pressure yielded a reading on the borderline of hypertension. OK, then. Treatment? I asked.
Amlodopine, she replied, naming a human hypertension treatment drug. I took it, briefly.
And … lowering hypertension in cats frequently results in the retina re-attaching itself.
That was new to me, too.
So he came back home, took his first dose of Amlodopine, is also on gabapentin for possible joint pain, and is nosing his way energetically around the house, learning how to avoid falling down stairs, and nesting on his relocated (off the bed) heating pad.
And still vocalizing. Supposedly that’ll stop in a couple of days.
So I guess that was the feline Grim Reaper, just some fella with the same suit.
