Compound It!

I mentioned a while ago that we had laid in a supply of enulose for Trouble, who has been having difficulty with her, um, regularity the last few months.  This has caused her to get dehydrated a couple of times, resulting in days spent at the vet with a tube in her poor little arm, so we have been trying to treat her prophylactically by giving her a dose now and then before she gets too plugged up.  (We can tell when she is getting constipated because she goes in her litter box, cries for a little while, and exits without leaving a deposit.  When this happens, out comes the eyedropper.  Getting old ain’t pretty, even for a cat.)

Anyway, there have been a couple of issues with getting the enulose into the cat.  First, it’s really a medication for humans.  This means that it comes in tasty flavors like orange and banana-pineapple or, as Trouble likes to call them, “poison” and “even worse poison”.  Second, it’s extremely thick and sugary, and when it dries, it becomes stiff and sticky.  This has been a problem because Trouble likes to foam at the mouth and drool out whatever medication you try to give her unless you get it exactly down her throat; this is of roughly equal difficulty to getting your torpedo down the air vent of the first Death Star, only you don’t have R2-D2 or Obi-Wan to help you out.  (Enulose can also be administered rectally, but I’m not going to be the one to try doing that to a cat who knows how to bunny-kick.)  So here’s this thick, sticky liquid that the cat detests, and the cat is wriggling this way and that trying to keep you from getting the eyedropper in her mouth, and when you finally think you have it lined up and pull the trigger she jerks her head off to the side at the last minute and she ends up covered in goo and then it dries and she looks like the “A Flock of Seagulls” guy only with a rather angrier expression, plus, she’s still constipated.

Enter your friendly neighborhood compounding pharmacy.

Now, I had no idea these places still existed, where qualified professionals could mix up drugs for you.  When I thought about prescription drugs at all, I sort of figured they arrived at the pharmacy in the forms, flavors, and dosages that the manufacturer saw fit to produce (and spent millions advertising), and that was it.  But when I asked our vet if it was possible to get enulose in some flavor that Trouble wouldn’t consider so vomitous, she did a little research and found us a place just a few miles up the street that could mix us up chicken-flavored enulose.  She wrote us a prescription for a huge jug of the stuff, and I picked it up yesterday.  So now Trouble has medication that she considers merely horrid instead of vilest poison, and the litter box has a nice big new deposit in it, and we have an enormous bottle of yummy enulose that we can use as a savory glaze the next time we bake a chicken.  It gives the skin that special shiny extra-crispy crunch!

The Enulose Big Gulp:  473 Bowel Movements In A Bottle