• Dr Liza’s Vet Tales Excerpt – Cat Conundrums

 Another tough cat that I remember was Blaze, a great big white cat, also with attitude who would growl at us as a reminder that he was in charge! His owner was devoted to his well-being and he was her pride and joy. Unfortunately many white cats suffer from a locally invasive skin cancer that if caught early, often doesn’t progress further after treatment. The skin cancer lesions are usually on the areas less protected by hair which includes their ears, nose and forehead. Blaze had a lesion on his head and we did surgery to remove it which was a big resection job and took a few weeks to heal completely.

Post operatively, it was important to protect the area from the sun and Blaze’s owner came up with a novel way to meet this need of her beloved cat, she bought a cute baby blue baby’s bonnet to put on big macho Blaze’s head!

I loved doing surgery at the practice, often we had a long list of cases to get through and one day many of the cases were cat speys, a procedure to remove the uterus and ovaries and thus prevent the cat from breeding. With experience, many vets manage to perform the operation through a tiny keyhole incision into the abdomen, skilfully fishing to find the uterus.

I gradually worked through the list speying cat after cat until I got to one cat whose uterine horn I just couldn’t find. A good while later, still with no luck having found the cats uterus, I was concerned having not yet encountered such an abnormality in my relatively short career, and called for a more senior vet Heather to come and help me. She gloved up and began to search but she couldn’t find the organ either. Heather had a bright idea and asked a very important question “Is it a female?” We checked and found to our horror that the cat was a male – no wonder I couldn’t find any female reproductive organs!

This was not a good thing to happen at all and thankfully it doesn’t happen very often when all nurse and vet checks are in place. I felt terrible that this little pussy cat had slipped through our system on this busy day and had undergone an unnecessary surgical procedure. He was quickly neutered which is a very straightforward operation but the major problem was to figure out how to explain what had happened to the kitty’s owner…

His owners the Mortons were best described by our receptionist Sally as “Hillbillies”, simple folk who were not your typical Kiwi family. They were a great big family who looked the part and all lived together on one property. One day Sally outlined how the mother of the family had come in and told her she had a really busy day ahead. Knowing that she didn’t work Sally enquired as to why and so she explained that she had some family coming over to visit so they had to clear the yard of all the old car pieces so that the caravan was easily accessible for them to sleep in.

Anyway, the Mortons came to pick up their kitty cat and I quickly realized that to try and explain anything near the truth would have been like discussing quantum physics with a baby and so all I had to say was “stitches out in 2 weeks time” and they were happy to have their kitty back!

To read more about my adventures, read Vet Tales available as a book or e-book from https://www.drliza.co.nz/shop/