Poor, expensive kitty

The cats needed their teeth cleaned. It's been a while for Mitchie and never for Boo. So, I make the appt and take them in.

I call around 2pm to find out if they did okay. And they did, the vet said. I make the appt to pick them up around 5:30pm.

We show to pay the bill. Which was $850.00. ...the hell?

Turns out, just like humans, animals can have terrible teeth too. And Mitchell is one of those cats. So, both canine teeth on the left side of his mouth are gone, plus one from the back. Plus, the 4 teeth the other vet had pulled out years before. Total of missing teeth: 7. The cats got their annual check ups, shots and stuff, plus the teeth cleaning. Boo cost us about 350.00 or so. That's okay. Mitchell was the 500.00 cat. Yikes. I'll remember this for next time. And by next time, I mean, Mitchell is going to have to have his teeth looked at every year.

Boo's teeth were fine. Coated with crud that they cleaned off, but fine.

So, they were bring the cats out to clean them up and pull off their bandages and stuff and they put Boo in her carrier -- which she HATES. HATES. So, she got pissed, which set Mitchell off and he freaked out. So, they couldn't clean him up. So, basically, they had to bring him out coated in his own gore, from the teeth that they pulled and had to leave the wound open a bit, because his teeth were SO infected. The doctor said that they were oozing pus when they went in. YUCK!!!!

Oops. I'm terrible. On the plus side, Mitchell was down a pound from the last time he was in and his bloodword was totally normal. Now, we just have to work on getting him down more. Under 21 pounds for next year. Cats shouldn't lose too much weight. I remember the summer I was gone in Shell Lake and Jake fed him for me. He lost like 2 pounds in a year or something and the doctor yelled at me for that. This is the point at which I gave up worrying about his weight. It was damned if you do and damned if you don't.

I have to give the Mitchell antibiotics for several days to clear up any remaining infection. But, since the teeth are gone, the infection will stop raging in his mouth, I'm sure.

I think the part that I feel the worst about is that his snaggletooth is gone. For those of you who have ever seen him, he used to have a tooth that hung out of his mouth all the time. That's one of the ones that got pulled out -- that was probably the worst infected tooth actually. I miss it. It gave him that "I'm a dumb kitty" look all the time. Now, he just looks normal.

Oh well. I'll get over it.

In other news, we have a pretty good plan in place for starting to pay off the ol' credit cards. I know that I write about money in the baby blog when I should be writing about baby stuff, but I can't help it.

Maybe I'll go write about finishing our registry today. Maybe.