Mike Munhall

Tonight, as I’m finally getting over the flu and finally getting my vacation started, Dorrie and I are dealing with another episode with our cat Simon. Around 10:00 tonight we found him wandering around the house, disoriented, and just acting very strange. He would wander along a wall and when he encountered an object he would drag himself over it and continue his examination of the wall. Occasionally he would get himself stuck in a corner and couldn’t figure out how to get out.

This got progressively worse over the next 15 minutes as he would traverse the same path over and over and get stuck in the same corners. No matter how many times we would help him get unstuck, he’d get himself stuck again in the same places.

Simon has been diabetic for about five years now. We had a hunch that Simon was suffering from hypoglycemia (low blood sugar). We gave him a few drops of Karo syrup and watched to see if he perked up. After 10 minutes there was no change. Time to call the emergency vet. Again. On a Sunday night. Again. Just before bed. AGAIN.

We brought Simon to the emergency vet to have him checked out. We let the vet tech know what we observed in his behavior and gave details of how much Karo syrup we gave him. Incidentally, Simon did perk up just a bit on the way to the hospital, so our suspicion that he was suffering from low blood sugar seemed appropriate. However, the vet said that Simon’s blood sugar level, while low, wasn’t entirely dangerous. She did a few other tests that came back without any strong indication of what was happening with our cat.

The vet decided that the best course of action would be to let us keep tabs on him overnight and call his regular vet in the morning for a battery of additional tests. On a hunch (this is the second hunch of the evening), I told the vet what I told the vet tech about giving Simon the Karo syrup and about how he perking up just slightly on the way to the hospital.

You could almost see the vet put the pieces of the puzzle together along with the missing piece that I had just given her. She said that his glucose level was where she would have guessed it would be for him to have suffered from dangerously low blood sugar and then given a small amount of syrup. Without that information, there’s no telling what Dorrie and I would be doing with our cat right now. The vet tech dropped the ball by not giving all the information to the vet.

Anyway, this is much too long of a story already. We’re home. It’s now Monday, and after some more syrup and a light snack, Simon is now sitting quietly on the floor wondering what just happened. We still have to get him to his regular vet in the morning, but at least Dorrie and I can get some sleep.

Good night.

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