poor.earl.

I'm cat sitting for earl, the cool cat next door. It's pretty easy- let him in (or out) in the morning, let him out (or in) in the evening, and fill his water and food bowls daily. I guess things have settled down enough that someone thought it was time to mix stuff up for me. Earl didn't come in yesterday. It's not that unusual- he often hangs out in the neighbor's house and gets food. When he didn't show up this morning either, i stopped next door to see if earl had been poking around. There he was, curled up on the porch couch, not looking so hot. He'd been there for a day and had refused to eat. Lordy. His owner thought he'd been in a fight, gotten scratched, and developed some sort of infection. He suggested keeping him inside and bringing him to the vet in the morning if he didn't seem better. After being away all day, i checked in on him around 6, and decided i didn't want to wait around for him to get worse. I bundled him up in a towel, stuck him on the front seat, and drove the 1/2 mile to the animal hospital. Poor earl. He was so mopey! The couldn't find anything in particular, but he did have a slight fever, so they gave him a shot of antibiotics and sent me home with medicine. The one thing that did worry them was that he'd gone from almost 13lbs in april to almost 10lbs now. That's almost 25% of his body weight- for a 150lb person, that would be almost 40lbs. Once his family gets back, they're supposed to take him back for blood tests to follow up. Cross your fingers that he's okay!