Flint Brabbin has been awarded the Fromus Vet Group’s

JUNE & JULY 2006 PET OF THE MONTH AWARD

Only Flint knows what really happened to his tail; and even he may not know for sure, as it was missing when he was rescued by his human when he was very small indeed.

Not only did he have no tail but other things at that end did not work very well at all and for the first five years of his life Flint suffered from blockages of his waterworks and lower bowel. It is likely that he was either born with these problems or suffered a serious injury when he was a tiny kitten.

Eventually the vets managed to control his waterworks problems using a special diet. But while all was well in that department he suffered increasingly from episodes of being constipated. For the first eight years of his life he had be given cod liver oil or flavoured liquid paraffin in his food to “keep him regular”. But as Flint grew older his problem was less easy to deal with and within the last year he needed five general anaesthetics to enable the vets to administer enemas to unblock him.

The thing about Flint is, that with all this need for medication and visits to the vet, he has remained an absolute gentleman showing immaculate manners and tolerance to his human who has to administer his medicine and the vets and nurses who have to treat him. But even he was getting a bit fed up with drips in his legs for days at a time and a perpetually sore bottom. He could not go on like this.

There was one last chance for Flint. In extreme cases it is possible to surgically remove the part of the bowel (the colon) that keeps getting bunged up. Usually a case for referral this was going to be far too expensive for Flint’s owner who by now felt she had bought the world’s entire liquid paraffin reserves over the years.

It was decided that it was worth the risk to carry out the surgery at Fromus.

In case you’ve just had breakfast, suffice it to say that the operation involved removing the large intestine and rejoining the end of the small intestine close to the anus. It was a long job but everyone was rooting for this wonderful character, willing him to pull through.

Flint and anaesthetics had never got on terribly well and after the operation Flint took a long time to recover. We were all very worried. For two days he lay almost motionless in his heated kennel being fed by drip. Nurses and vets alike queued up to stroke and talk to him. His mum brought in his favourite foods to tempt him out of his near comatose repose. We were all close to tears.

Then, on the third morning the duty vet came in to be greeted by Flint standing up, arching his back and stretching his legs with an expression that could only mean, “Oi! Where’s my breakfast? I could murder a couple of kippers!”

Flint never looked back; (in more ways than one). He went home to be pampered even further and a week later his mum reported that he had used the dirt tray normally more times in those seven days than during the rest of his ten years put together!

A sore end came to a happy end and it could not have happened to a nicer cat. The icing on the cake? .. the biggest smile I have ever seen on his mum’s face.

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