I’d previously written an article on how to give cats liquid or solid medicine, but that was long before I had my own poor sick kitty who needed me to give him not just one type of medication, but two.
The first type was easy-peasy. It came straight from the vet, and I would just crack it into halves, then drop the half he needed at each meal with his food and he’d gobble de goop it up. No worries.
The second type. Hell. On. Earth.
Not just for him – for me, too, and not just because I couldn’t get him to eat it. Because this one time we tried to get him to eat it and he was trying to do it, he started foaming at the mouth because of how acidic it was.
Luckily, the vet had previously warned me this would happen, otherwise I would have thought he was really, really not okay and terribly ill from the medication. But the vet said this would happen because it was medication made for humans (we had to pick it up from a regular pharmacy) and that it was bitter inside, and because we had to give him a quarter of it, once the inside was exposed because we’d cut it into parts, the flavour wouldn’t be masked by the outside coating on the sides we’d cut into.
It was awful. I tried everything, from trying to coat it in petroleum jelly – which he loves – to trying to hide it in a pill pocket we DIYed – which he’d eat around and it just wouldn’t go down, so we didn’t even bother to try real pill pockets, which he would have done the same with.
And while most cats are calm and you can do that pretty epic trick of throwing the pill at the back of their throat to get them to swallow it – Athos was not having it. And I was also concerned with the foaming if we ended up having the pill touch his tongue anyway, so it was just all deeply concerning.
