A lesson I have to keep learning

Abbey on her stool under the window.

We got some upsetting news about Abbey this past week.

She was set to have her spay done on Tuesday. I dropped her off at the vet’s office on the way to work.

The vet called me that afternoon and told me that they were unable to take her blood for the pre-anesthesia blood work until they had sedated her. They had her prepped for surgery when they got her blood results back. They weren’t going spay her that day.

Both her white cell count and her red cell count were lower than normal.

Some background: The day after we adopted her, we took Abbey to the vet for a check-up. She tested negative for feline leukemia and FIV. We were given a kit to get a stool sample to check for worms.

We didn’t get the sample to the vet’s until the week before her surgery, and she tested positive for worms. So we picked up medicine and give it to her for the prescribed three days, to be repeated in three weeks and six weeks.

We had not seen any signs of worms, and we keep Abbey inside all the time. But we don’t know where she was before she went to the shelter, and she stayed in the shelter for four months.

I feel so bad for not getting the sample into the vet’s sooner.

When the vet called me about her blood work, she said she didn’t think it was time to worry (easier said than done!). Abbey appeared to be healthy. The vaccinations she received the day after adoption could have caused the numbers to go down, but usually that resolved after a couple of weeks. She said parasites and infection could also cause the low numbers.

So her advice was to give her another dewormer, a different medicine that covered more types of parasites. She also gave us a vitamin supplement with iron to give her. We’ll retest her blood in a month. If the numbers are still low, we’ll retest her for feline leukemia and FIV in case she got a false negative the first time.

Abbey seems to feel good. She plays hard. She gained point 4 pounds in the three weeks from her adoption to spay day. She has not shown any signs of illness. The vet said it was fine to have her out with Chase Bird as long as neither showed signs of illness.

I did what I usually do when I get worried about a health problem with my cats or Larry—I started Googling. I know it’s a way to cope, a way to feel like I have some control over the situation.

But really, other than giving Abbey her meds and watching her, I have no control over the situation. It’s a wait and see situation until we retest her blood.

I wonder sometimes why I have to keep learning this lesson that we never can know for sure that all is well, that life throws curves all the time. But I’m not having to learn the lesson any more than anyone else. We all have lives that throw us curves. I just happen to have a disorder—OCD—that make it particularly difficult to deal with uncertainty.

So we’ll deal with what it is, if it’s anything more than an infection of parasites. And we are enjoying Abbey so much. She is a sweetie and so funny. She likes to follow Chase Bird around. Sometimes he is OK with that, sometimes he runs away, and she chases after him.

I love Chase Bird and Abbey and taking care of them. I’m enjoying that every day.