A Spoon Full of Sugar…

…Or cheese flavored chewy treats, makes the medicine go down.

Oliver, as you may remember, has allergies. His summer allergies aren’t too bad. He gets runny eyes and a little zitty on his chin. With our weird weather this year they are a little worse than normal.

Dr. Tiffany and I had discussed pills rather than a shot for his milder allergies at his last appointment. She’d told me they can make treats with medicine in them. They are a bit more expensive, but much easier to give.

Assuming you don’t have a cat who refuses to eat them because he knows it’s a trap.

I sent Dr. Tiffany an email asking her if this was a good time to try them out. At the very last moment, something made her refer to them as beef treats instead of just treats. Wait, what? Oliver is allergic to beef. I don’t know if it’s actually an allergy or if, technically, it’s a sensitivity. But I do know that it makes his face break out. And it makes him explode.

While Tiff found out if the treats come in chicken, she gave me a couple regular pills to see if prednisone would do the trick.

We pause in this story to tell you about my mad pill popping skillz. Oliver’s big sister, Poco, had asthma. She took prednisone on a regular basis for most of the 21 years of her life. She never accepted it. So I am good at walking nonchalantly up to a cat and tossing a pill down their throat before they know what’s happening. I’m also good at wrestling a 20 pound tortie to the ground, shoving a pill soggy from being spit out five times into her hissing, foaming mouth and clamping her jaw closed while telling her for a fact that we will repeat this until the pill dissolves and goes down her throat in liquid form if we have to. And I’m accustomed to finding pills she pretended to swallow and spit out when I looked away all over the house. What I’m saying is that I am fearless but real about pill giving.

Back to Oli. It was a long shot, because cats are annoyingly smart about this sort of thing, but I tried shoving the pill into a treat. I fully expected that Oliver would eat the treat and spit out the pill. I didn’t get to test the theory because the treats aren’t big enough to contain a pill.

I squeezed the pill between two treats and set the monster treat down on the floor with some others. Before I stood up, the pill had fallen out.

And Oliver ate it.

Wait, what?

I repeated the process on Saturday. This time I just rubbed the pill with a treat and set it on the floor with some others. And Oliver ate it.

So… That’s going to save me some money.

I did learn, today, that the treats need to be served on a hard surface. I gave them to him on the rug and the pill escaped. But he wolfed it right down with a second round of treats in the kitchen.

At last, there is something good about a kitten who doesn’t chew – or even taste – his food.