TIFU by giving my cat the wrong meds

Our male cat is about 13, with long orange fur. He sheds like crazy in the spring, so we get him professionally groomed. He is NOT a fan of being groomed. Our vet prescribed a mild sedative to eliminate his anxiety, and to protect the groomer from being mauled to death! We give him one the night before and another one about an hour before his appointment. We refer to these as his Happy Pills.

A few months ago, he was having some digestive issues (hairballs complicated by his love of eating dried leaves he catches in our tiny backyard). Another trip to the vet gets a clean bill of health since he seemed to be past the worst of it. The vet prescribes an appetite stimulant since he hadn’t eaten much for a couple of days (this was our big clue that something was wrong because he ALWAYS eats his entire meal). We didn’t need to give him any of the pills, and just put them in the medicine cabinet and forgot about them.

Fast forward to this week to prep for his grooming appointment. I give him his evening dose of his happy pills, and we all go to bed. Around midnight, he was unusually vocal and woke us up. I ignored it and went back to sleep. The next morning, again, he was very insistent that he was ready for breakfast (I’ve trained him that if he pesters me too much, it just delays getting fed). I feed him and set a reminder to give him his next dose an hour before we head out for his day at the spa.

I go to give him his second dose and realize these pills don’t look like the ones that I remember giving him in the past. Sure enough, he is far from calm, he is pestering me to feed him again. I quickly realize my mistake and give him his happy pill and hope that it’s enough to get him through his appointment. We’ve had to reschedule in the past because he just wasn’t having it that day.

As silly as this seemed in the moment, we had no experience with him taking an appetite stimulant. The next 48 hours seemed like an eternity. He was bugging us every time we walked into the kitchen, crying incessantly, wanting to be fed.

TL;DR: I gave our cat an appetite stimulant instead of a sedative to prep him for his grooming appointment. He bugged us constantly for 2 days to be fed.

Edit: See obligatory cat pic in comments.