It must be over six months since Primrose first became ill. We took her to the vet as an emergency and didn’t think she’d be coming back with us, but the vet was more optimistic and Primrose slowly recovered.
It’s been a one step forward – one step back type of recovery, hampered by the fact we didn’t really know what was wrong with her. One symtom was she stopped eating – and she has done this before when she first came to us. And she has other digestive problems, but we had to force feed her for a while and then she started to eat by herself and has been putting on weight.
However, I noticed that she wasn’t eating on one side of her mouth, so we asked the vet to take a look and she’s got a tooth infection, which certainly wouldn’t be helping things. But because Primrose was weak and recovering, the vet didn’t want to take the tooth out.
So since then Primrose has been eating canned food, as she can’t eat dry food, and because we’ve been wanting to feed her up – she’s very much being feed on demand. And she certainly does demand!
We also don’t know Primrose’s past. She has opaque eyes, and we don’t know what she can see – and we also don’t know if this is from injury, sickness or from birth.
Primrose has now put on quite a lot of weight and is probably at her normal weight now, and she’s very much her ‘normal’ self. So we took her to the vet to see about having her tooth out. As per normal – Primrose comes straight out of her carrier and then proceeds to climb up Ian.
The vet was really happy to see that Primrose has put on weight and wanted to do a blood test before deciding whether she was OK to have the tooth removed. The vet is aware that we don’t know Primrose’s past – or indeed her true age. She said that Primrose could live to be 20, so if they can take the tooth out, it would be better to do so to give her a better quality of life. However I think reading between the lines she was also saying that if they find an underlying problem, then given the time it will take for her to recover from the tooth extraction, she won’t recomend that we proceed.
That’s when the fun started! When Primrose was very poorly, it was easy to take blood from her, however now she gets quite fighty! When another vet was bought into help and we were all trying to hold her still, the vet decided that it was better to sedate her so it would be less stressful all round and she sent us away with a pill to give her before our next visit.
So we went back today with a sleepy Primrose. It was still a bit of a struggle, but they managed to get enough blood. We’ll find out next whether it’s OK for them to remove the tooth.