House Cat

Emily the Cat has recently starred in a feline version of “House,” which makes her a “House Cat.” For the uninitiated, “House” is a television medical drama that my daughter and are in the habit of watching on DVD each Sunday night. Dr. Gregory House, the star of the show, is an irascible, irreverent yet brilliant diagnostician, obnoxious to patients, manipulative with friends, addicted to pain pills, lacking in people skills and obsessed with solving complex diagnostic puzzles at nearly any price. He is surrounded by beautiful, intelligent women who are inexplicably attracted to him, of course.

Each House episode involves desperate diagnostic measures, treatments that are stabs in the dark, fairly gruesome and graphic scenes of medical mayhem, patients being resurrected from near death with those round things they put on your heart that make you jerk up into the air, and at least one MRI, spinal tap and/or brain biopsy through a tiny hole drilled in the head.

I plunged into the somewhat less complex world of veterinary medicine the other day after Emily stopped eating, becoming even tinier than she already is in only a few days, and seeming close to death. Blood tests revealed high bilirubin, a sign that the liver isn’t functioning right. The doctor (an affable fellow with no resemblance to House) recommended a liver biopsy, which he unceremoniously extracted through a small puncture in Emily’s abdomen and sent off for tests. Meanwhile Emily had to stay in the hospital with a feeding tube to keep from starving to death while we waited for the lab results.

The results were better than feared—no cancer or hepatitis. Pancreatitis, already subsiding and treatable. But the feeding tube has to stay in for the time being, and with Emily coming home, it would be my job to fill the syringe with soupy brown (but nutritious) cat food and meds four times a day and squirt it into the little feeding tube protruding from the side of Emily’s neck like a perverted periscope.

Emily is understandably irritated by this invasion and periodically hides under a bed at feeding time. But so far we are getting along okay and I am hoping she will start eating on her own soon because I would be sadder than I can describe here to see her go. Stay tuned.