The Cat Turns On Me

Maybe I engage in risky behaviors when my husband is away playing a gig hoping something bad will happen to me and he'll feel bad that he wasn't there to save me and never leave me again. I swim alone in the dark. I let the cats out. And I am determined to bring them all back in before he comes home, even though it would be easier to leave the problem cases out until he came home and let him deal with it. They come right to him when he calls anyway. And by 3 in the morning, they're more than ready to come in. At midnight, the party is just getting started.

Saturday night I swam in the dark alone. Only Arbee was out, and I held the downstairs door open for her to come in. Unless she's spooked by something, she takes a very long time to decide whether or not to come in. Outside she has the whole backyard and no one to bother her. Inside, she usually has to spend her time under the bed or crouched behind the litter boxes to keep from getting into unprovoked spats with other cats. She doesn't care for cats or people.

I thought I was safe because the whole time I was floating in the pool, I could see all the other cats in upstairs windows staring at me, wondering why I was out with the crickets in the dark and they weren't. Arbee was still contemplating whether or not to come in when out of nowhere Seven and Chatter made the trip downstairs and shot out the door. I chased after Seven because once out, he's gone or at least I can't catch him. He won't come to me. Chatter answers to his name and docilely lets you pick him up.

As Seven shot by, I reached down and grabbed his tail. He didn't like that and let me know it, but I didn't want to let him go into the night. I held on. Big mistake. He flipped around and sunk his teeth into my lower leg and grabbed the rest of my leg with all his claws and gave me a good rake. Then, for good measure, he nipped my wrist and slapped Chatter in the face a few times just for standing too close.

I let go of his tail. He took off over the fence. Damn. That hurt. And now I'm gushing blood. I bleed all over the bathroom floor. In the bathtub, it looks like "Psycho" going down the drain. It won't stop bleeding. Now I'm sitting on the floor with the bandages box, slapping them on. One, two, gauze pad, tape, more gauze, more tape. It takes a wad to finally contain the blood. My flip flops are soaked through.

Now I have an inner debate for the next 30 minutes to an hour. Should I go to the emergency room? Do I need stitches? Will I get infected and have to have my leg amputated? That decides it. I balance spending $100 on the co-payment or losing a leg and the $100 wins. But first I still have to get the cats in. Chatter and Arbee now come in easily. I guess the commotion convinced Arbee. Seven is nowhere to be found, even though I hobble up and down the street a couple of times with a flashlight.

I take a book and go to St. Mary's, enjoying the idea that I'll be sitting in an emergency room all night and meanwhile Bobby will come home and find the bathroom and hallway covered in blood, me gone, and he'll decide to give up music and never leave me again. Only St. Mary's busy night is Monday, not Saturday. This hospital doesn't get the gunshots or car accidents. I'm in and out in an hour with new bandages and a tetanus shot. I didn't even need stitches. It isn't even bleeding anymore.

By the time Bobby comes home, I'm in bed asleep. Because I left the backyard lights on, he knows someone is still out. He wakes me up. "Who's out?"

"Seven." I am too tired to tell my story, and I figure he'll see all the blood and wake me up anyway, vowing never to leave me alone again.

He doesn't wake me up again. In the morning, I find myself alone in the bed. He never came to bed, never even saw the upstairs bathroom. I find him asleep on the sofa downstairs. I wake him up. "Seven didn't come back until 5:30," he complains.

"Look what he did to my leg!" Somehow, my story isn't as powerful now, balanced against the fact he sat up all night waiting for Seven to come back. He'll probably keep leaving me alone.

While I type this, Seven, as huge as a dog, sits on my lap as if he never tried to kill me. I guess he doesn't know it was me who grabbed him by the tail when he was escaping into the night.

Rhapsody in Cats

Seven vs. Bird

Wrestling with Neelix

Baby Neelix

Neelix was a sick kitten. We didn't know from day-to-day if he was going to live.

Neelix Helps in the Office

Sulu Plays the Windchimes

Seven and Kira, Son and Mother

Just a Nub

The hair has grown back on Chatter's nub of a tail. (See older entries about why he lost his tail.) When a neighbor cat jumped over our fence, he puffed the hair on his tail out in defensive mode. My husband said it looked like a little rabbit tail.

A Little More Chill

Letting Arbee have more outdoor time has made her a happier cat. And she doesn't freak out anymore. It's easier to get her to come back inside. She has let go of another one of her feral instincts, but you still can't pick her up.

Merly Needs to Lose Weight

The Brothers Run a Vet Bill on Routine Stuff!

I tried a new vet, Allied, which is the second closest to our house, and it wasn't particularly a warm and friendly place. They have great hours, all day Saturday and Sunday evening, but now I suspect the vets may not be there then. It may just be for pick up and dropping off at the attached kennel.

I got the usual chilly response when I confessed to having eight cats. Why do I keep doing that? I turned down the fecal exams and ear cleanings, but caved in to the FELV shots when all I wanted was rabies. Got distemper shots, too, and they say Sulu has a tapeworm. You'd never know it by his size. So that meant two courses of tapeworm medication for both him and Seven and a flea and parasite medication, and the warning that all the cats need it. Just the flea part would be $100 for all of them. As it was, the bill was $315.

After we came into a small inheritance before Christmas that paid off Chatter's vet bills, now I find myself back in the hole. This is definitely the problem with too many cats. If I had one, I could indulge it with everything the vet had to offer. With eight, I have to pick and choose.

Cat in the Night

Christmas night, we were leaving West Point for New Kent, and stopped in the empty Hardee's parking lot to look at a Christmas present, and my husband had to point out that a cat, bigger than a kitten but smaller than a full grown cat, was nosing around the parking lot perimeter. He was a solid, dark color. I was scared to get out of the car and approach it because it was too close to the highway and might run in the wrong direction. So off he went to his own fate, and I felt bad for many miles about what would become of that cat...

....until we hit a possum. Then I got to feel really bad about that.

Another $100 Invested in the Tail That is No More

Friday afternoon, my husband got home from work to find Chatter had gotten his collar off and pulled out a couple of stitches, leaving his wound open on the corner and looking like an oozing jelly donut. I was hoping he was exaggerating, but when I got home, I conceded we had to go back to Lakeside. Another $100 to have him restitched. At least these stitches look tighter. And he got a plastic cone and some painkiller liquid.

The plastic cone keeps him from opening his mouth, it is so tight. When he got home, he squatted in front of the food bowl, his plastic cone sitting in the food, but there was no way he could position himself to actually reach food or even open his mouth. We took it off.

A little while later, the vet called and asked how things were going, even though we had just been home a little while. I told her about the cone and food problem. "Oh yeah, you can take it off for him to eat."

Actually, he hasn't worn it since. Even my husband thinks it is too harsh and has him back in the soft cone. We are going to find some Velcro somewhere and try to redesign it so at least he can open his mouth.

The $1,000 Tail

Chatterbox lost his tail. It's a long story I might save for the book, but we had to rush him to Carytown Emergency Vet at midnight because his tail was literally hanging by what appeared to be a white thread. How did we go so wrong with the wound care? If the vet assistant at Lakeside hadn't nicked his tail when she was shaving it, would this have happened? We picked him up the next morning at 6:30 a.m., with just an inch-long stub left of his lovely tail. He has to wear the damn collar until the stitches are out. He wants to pull the stitches out himself, so this time we have to be strong and keep it on.

The bill was $650. Ouch. Ouch. Add to that the several previous bills and money spent on bandages and ointments, and we've got a thousand invested in a tail we lost. (Look at the picture. The tail seemed to be doing okay. How did we go from this to no tail at all?)

Did you see the woman on "Dr. Phil" today with 200 cats? At least she had 10 acres and was getting them all neutered, but still the neighbors are mad. Dr. Phil said she had to find homes for those cats, but I could tell the very idea of it was killing her. She knew all their names. I bet she doesn't part with them. We never do.

Cats Abound at Grey Gardens

I just watched the documentary "Grey Gardens" about Jackie Kennedy's crazy relatives in their run-down house, and it wasn't about their cats, it was just about being crazy, but there were a lot of cats around. Craziness and cats seem to go together.

Another Rejection

I got a two sentence form letter from the Barbara Braun Associates, Inc. literary agency, and they started the second sentence with "But." Isn't that really one sentence? "Thanks for submitting your proposal, but I'm afraid I receive many submissions, and I can only represent a limited number of them." Instead she starts a second sentence with the "But I'm afraid..."

I guess she's an agent, not a writer. Her signature, and scratching in my full name and the date in the fill-in-the-blank-areas, looked like a much older woman still using an ink cartridge pen.

Meanwhile, my brother sends me the Web site of the New York Literary Agency, referred to him by one of his persistent fans who thought it would be good for my book. You fill in a Web site form as a query. Well, that makes it easier. But within hours, I get a form letter reply asking to see the whole manuscript. I do a Google search on this agency and find a forum complaining about it. They like everyone's manuscripts, and pretty much sign everyone to a contract, wherein you have agreed to get critiques, editing help and a Web site, all for fees, as part of the process of just trying to find a publisher. They even take Paypal. How convenient.

So I guess I will pass on them.

Reality vs. Vetworld

In what alternative universe has any cat kept this collar on longer than it takes for him to pull it off? Why do vets think they are going to wear it?

Cat Tail Injury Part 2

I think my husband overreacts, maybe because he's never had children. I just don't want to run to the vet with every new development. Let's see if the cat gets obviously worse, or maybe it will get better on its own! But my husband gets wound up and I end up riding along on the panic train.

So we've spent another $78 on Chatterbox's tail with no real reason. The cut had turned into what looked like a big raw area, probably because he was licking it and pulled a scab off. So they shaved his tail completely and want him to wear one of those collars. They gave us two more bottles of antibiotic and a cleansing lotion and said to come back in four days.

That's crazy. I'm not paying for another office visit after only four days unless he is dramatically worse. Four days isn't enough time to get even a little better. Maybe when we're done with the antibiotic and it still looks bad.

My husband keeps trying to put that collar on him -- we had one from last time Chatterbox was hurt, so I saved $15 on that -- and he keeps pulling it off. The first time he got one leg through it and was walking crazy, with one leg in front of the collar and one behind. The second time he got both legs through it so the collar was sitting at his waist like a skirt. At first, he couldn't walk out of a room with it on because he couldn't turn a corner.

Chatterbox Injures His Tail

The bill was $217 and I almost wanted to throw up when I put Chatterbox back in the car. And he didn't even break his tail. The x-rays show all the bones are in place. "Soft tissue damage," the vet thought. Worst case scenario is his tail remains deadweight and he doesn't recognize it anymore as part of him and starts to attack it, but so far he's been cleaning it himself and it has regained a little movement. He can move it an inch or so away from his legs, just not lift it.

But I can't remember Chatterbox ever being very expressive with his tail. We have no idea what happened to it. He went out on Saturday morning for a short while, came back in, and growled when you touched him. We noticed the tail was just hanging limp. By the time I got to the vet, there was a little bit of blood in the cage, but not as much after the vet assistant nicked his tail while shaving it. Then it was gushing. The vet, a new one in Lakeside, was very apologetic, so I liked her for that. So he got a big bandage until the nick stopped bleeding.

For a few days, he took a liquid painkiller and an antibiotic. Now he's still on the antibiotic and a pill. We have about three days more of that. The easiest way to give him his medicine is for Bobby to hold him over his shoulder. He takes it easily from me that way if he's in daddy's arms.