Failure to Floss

When you start life living wild, you don't always pay sufficient attention to your health needs.  By the time Napster came to us, he carried the marks of a rough and tumble existence -- scarred ears, broken teeth.  Sue, who rescued him from the wilderness, had already taken care of the necessary vaccinations and interventions. He arrived here healthy, if with a lot of character.

And healthy he has remained. Well, except for that period when his waistline expanded to exceed his length, but he was able to get back on top of that with the assistance of his walking program.  Weight loss is all about movement. He has a great deal of empathy for Kirstie Alley and her journey with Dancing with the Stars.

He is attended regularly by our stable vet, who gives him his annual check-up, and if there is anything amiss, refers him to a small animal vet clinic. He gets regular dishes of kibble designed to remove tartar and keep his teeth gleaming.

So it was a bit of a shock when he was wrestling with Taffy earlier this spring and BOING ... one of his canine teeth tangled up in her woolly coat and came out.  Flossing, we decided, is best not done using puppy fur.  This was one honkin' big tooth...  and we were concerned that it might leave enough of a hole for infection to sneak on in there. 

When the area was still red and sore looking a week or so later, Napster found himself bundled off to visit the vet. Now, sadly, car ravel and vet visits are not really high on his list of favourite activities.  The staff at the Muskoka Animal Hospital are excellent, and try very hard to make him feel right at home, but, well, it is a vet clinic. It smells of medicine, and worse, it smells of strange dogs. He was grumpy about the whole thing.

But he had to be there.  In order to get a really good look in that little cat mouth, Dr. Earl had to give him an anaesthetic... and that was the chapter in which we learned that the tooth which gave it all away by coming out was already abscessed.  Plus he had another tooth abscess, and some other dental issues with resorbing roots and broken molars and things you really don't see unless you take an xray.  It was evident he had failed to floss.  Any dentist will warn you of the repercussions of that oversight.

 Dr. Earl and Kathy were long time Bondi guests -- right up until they decicded they liked the area so much they were going to move their Vet Clinic here.

That's the thing about cats -- they rarely mention if they have tooth pain.  We report however that his mouse-breath condition has gone away, and we attribute that to his new dental health!

Not that there's much left to be considered dental... with only one front canine, he has a distincly lopsided smile, but it really just adds to his artistic mystique.

He is completely recovered, seems to be even a happier cat, and is enjoying his long walks in the spring air.  His art is selling exceptionally well, and all is wonderful in Napster's world.  Except that the puppy still tries to wrestle him to the ground... regularly.  Even world-famous artists sometimes get no respect...