I don't think anyone exactly *likes* needles. I don't.

But sometimes they are better than the alternative.

My cat got to the point that she could barely force herself to drink water. That was one of the first signs to me that she was in bad trouble.

This was heartbreaking to me, because she tried her best but could barely manage it, standing over by her fountain and concentrating on the water flowing out, where she had learned to lap it from the stream in mid-air. This was after a diagnosis of incipient renal failure, and many months of me giving her positive reinforcement basically praising the heck out of her every time I saw her drinking, and much delight that she was doing exactly what she needed to.

Toward the end--and believe me, I am still having trouble accepting that it was the end--she became dehydrated, and that made her feel much worse. I've been there. In a dehydrated state, you get bad headaches, and you generally feel just crappy.

One of the few things we could do to make her more comfortable was give her subcutaneous fluids. Did I like that? Hell, no. Did it help her? Yes, it did. My cat was a demon at the vet's, and she was not pillable under any circumstances, but she handled injections with barely a flinch, and she got to where she actually purred as her saline flowed in. She was a champion.

Ultimately it turned out that she had just about the worst kind of cancer you can get: pancreatic. So that was that.

But if maintaining a decent quality of life for her--one that would enable her to enjoy herself and feel good, even if she had never been able to zoom around like a kitten again--had been a matter of daily sub-q fluids, we would have done that for as long as she felt okay about it. We were NOT going to mess around with any dialysis or feeding tubes or any of that stuff that would have robbed her of her dignity or made her miserable, but if we had just had to spend a few minutes every morning and evening with the necessary evils of needles, we would have done that.

I'm curious about medical and veterinary costs in Denmark. It's all very, very expensive in the United States. There are American citizens who will actually get their own medical supplies from veterinarians (kind of a black-market thing), and people who cross the border into Canada and Mexico to defray the costs.

If I had had to do so long-term, I would have made arrangements to get the saline bags & needles & tubes & all via the internet. I couldn't have afforded to take my cat to the vet every time. But I would have done whatever it took to help her.