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Soon after I got better, we noticed that Bear was acting stranger and stranger. He would wail for no reason, wander around sniffing at strange places, wailing. And I know it was crying and not plain meowing now, after the fact. At first we were just annoyed because we thought he was begging for food. We’d feed him, he’d eat and he’d start wailing again. It was pretty distressing.

But I knew something was up when he started peeing everywhere else but the litter box. The first clue was him peeing in his bed – right out in the open in front of us. Then he started sniffing around the couch and recliners too. By this time I had already looked up the symptoms on Google; they had been ringing a bell in my head because the person who gave us Bear had mentioned them to me at one point. The web confirmed what I had already suspected – Bear had a UTI. So I told hubby we had to get him to a vet ASAP.

I was grateful that he was still on vacation, because if it weren’t for him, I think I’d have got myself in a load of trouble the next day when at the vet on post, we were told that they can’t see him “until late next week”. WTF?!!! Who tells the owner of a cat with a UTI that? Are they sick? Luckily for THEM, they handed us a list of off-post vets that we could go see instead.

The one nearest to us seemed the best bet and I was on the phone with them immediately. I liked their attitude: they were concerned and nothing stopped them from seeing him. Even though we didn’t have his records on us to prove their inoculations were up-to-date, they believed us when we said he was covered. Come to think of it, if we said we’d just moved, they were more than likely to believe us since we couldn’t have travelled with them without them being covered …

Anyway, poor Bear was so uncomfortable in the carrier that he actually peed onto his towel. When we took him out of it, there was a corner of the towel that was red and smelled of urine. That seemed to convince everybody what Bear was going through – the vet actually said he didn’t really need a sample to confirm but he had to take it for the records. And then he did something with Bear’s bladder and got him to pee a little into a cup… and out came bloody urine.

Long story short, Bear got sent home with antibiotics, can food (ooh yummmmmm!) and some new food we were to wean them onto which should help with healthy organ function. Vet cautioned us that we mightn’t be able to get it at Walmart or on-post but that he was sure Petsmart would have it. Then he went on to explain that the water here in Texas is SO hard that it sometimes creates stones in the bladders of kittehs which in turn cause urinary tract infections. Poor kittehs find it SO painful to pee, that they associate the litter box with the pain and attempt to pee everywhere else just to ease the pain. (Not too smart, kittehs, eh?) He said UTI’s can also be caused by stress, and considering we had just moved halfway across the country under trying circumstances, it wasn’t unusual for Bear to get one of these things.

Course, he said we’d also have to start buying purified water for them too … but I don’t know that this wasn’t just stress. I am going to bet that it’s not so much the water as the stress of the move. And I am hoping that I don’t lose on this one.

The worst part of the whole ordeal was having to confine Bear. Aside from not really wanting to have kittehs in the spare room, I just really hated to separate them. It was painful to see Nala laying down in front of the door, sticking her paws under it, crying and pawing at what I assumed to be Bear on the other side doing the same thing. How far they’ve come: when Nala first came to us, Bear spent the better part of the first week hissing at Nala. Whilst we were moving, Nala spent the better part of the entire journey hissing at Bear.

Well, Bear is clearly feeling MUCH better these days, even though he still has some pills left to finish. He’s happier and he just seems himself again…. thankfully.

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