Deaf cat

We noticed that our cat had been quite deaf recently.  Of course, cats will routinely ignore their owners/servants so it's fair to ask how we noticed.  The big thing was that when we made the "food noise", she did not even twitch.  I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that there is a food noise that we make for the cat, but since we inherited/stole her from some friends who instructed us to make the food noise when we were going to feed her, my excuse is that you can't teach an old cat new tricks so it's not our fault.

In my family, we always summonsed our cats by whistling the Gilbert and Sullivan song, "Titwillow", whilst dressed as Japanese courtiers.  If the cat was sufficiently amused, it would saunter over to see what you had to offer.  But here we were with a new old cat that only responded to a different food noise, a kind of nauseating kissy noise, that we morphed into a clicky, lipsmacky noise if only to save our own sanity.

(The cat also responded, by the way, to the noise of a vaccuum cleaner.  It would respond by running around the room like a motorcycle wall of death rider before flinging itself into a cupboard, whether the door was open or not.  But that's not what this story is about.)

Anyway, we'd noticed that the cat was going a little deaf.  Every time I go deaf it's because the top 3 inches of the Simpson Desert have found their way into my ear canal so I take myself off to the doctor to have them syringed.  Having your ears syringed is one of the great pleasures of life.  You go in deaf, tired, frustrated, hoarse from shouting and with a sore neck from looking around wondering if people are speaking to you or not.  You come out hearing the rustle of sparrows' feathers from blocks away, able to follow every voice in a party.  It's like being born again.

But let me tell you, that is nothing compared to the pleasure of syringing someone else's ears.  I really get into it.  Sometimes you're there for a while and you start to doubt whether anything will ever come out.  But then, oh my!  Out comes great clods of brain-earth, the muck and mud fills your bowl and you go back for more like a gold miner whose every swing of the pickaxe digs deeper into a glistening vein of ore.  It's magic.  Earlier this year before a life support and resuscitation tutorial the doctors asked if we'd done anything exciting yet at our practices.  Other people had delivered babies, amputated limbs, surgically constructed monstrous creatures out of man and beast, but I stood proudly and announced that I'd syringed a lot of ears.  The doctor looked at me like I was feebleminded.  And perhaps I was.

So because the cat was deaf it occurred to me that she might have her ears all full of wax.  I'd have tried syringing them myself, but ever since I required months of painful rehab to recover from the wounds she gave me when I tried to make her take a tablet, I've been averse to performing medical procedures on my cat.  I did get out my tuning fork and attempt to diagnose conductive or sensorineural hearing loss (as explained in a previous post) but my cat was being obdurate and refused to cooperate.  So we took her to the vet, thinking that we'd prefer to look stupid than sentence our cat to a lifetime of trivially-cured deafness.  Which of course meant that we ended up looking stupid.

The first thing the vet did was to clap her hands and stamp her feet like a flamenco dancer and tell us that the cat could hear after all, on the grounds that it looked terrified and was trying to flee.  As were we.  It was a small room, and quite echoey in the manner of clinical rooms, and those hand claps were painfully loud.  She must have seen the fear in our eyes and mistaken it for the dull stupor of the insanely rich, because she began offering us all sorts of very expensive options for investigating our deaf cat that she had just told us could hear.

For example, to rule out the slim possibility that the cat's middle ear was being obstructed by a slow-growing tumour, we could fly our cat to Sydney and have an MRI done for only a thousand dollars.  So we passed on that since, as she had already pointed out, the cat could hear, and for a thousand dollars I could buy probably a billion grains of rice.  Regarding the cat's kidneys, which are slowly deteriorating, as things do when you're the equivalent of 126 years old, we were able to escape with urine and blood tests (of the cat).

Urine tests are less invasive for the cat, although there is a fair amount of squeezing involved.  But the advantage of getting the blood tests done as well is that they have to shave a little patch of fur off the cat's neck to get access to the vein.  When you scratch this little spot a few days later, it must feel pretty funny, because the cat's back leg involuntarily comes up and starts to kick, as if the cat were no more than a stupid dog.  Great stuff.

The other great thing about getting the tests done is that when the vet calls later on and gives you a generic answer like, "Her kidneys are slowly deteriorating", you can say, "Oh, so the urea and creatinine were up from last time?  Was there any proteinuria?", and the vet knows that what you're really saying is, "I know your game and you can't lure me into your silly expensive tests and treatments, so there!", and you can hang up the phone afterwards with great relish, knowing that you won this round.

Hopefully the cat doesn't have one of these tumours in its ear or I'm going to feel really guilty.