Thursday, August 26, 2010

Fur Babies

Today I wanted to write a nice lively post about Husband's and mine trip to Mount Rainier yesterday, but shit has gone down, and plans have changed.

Husband and I have cats. Lots and lots of cats. Well, three, but when they are long haired and shed everywhere and you live in a teeny house it feels like a lot. We love them. LOVE them.

We also really suck at naming our pets. We gave them these fantastic names, and then.... never used them. So they each have two names, the "official" one, and the commonly used nickname.

When Husband first moved to Seattle we adopted two kittens, sisters.

This is Sal:

 

I named her Sal because it means salt, and there is nothing that Husband loves more than salt. Except for maybe napping. But really, salt. He puts salt on everything, without even tasting it first. Including things like cheeseburgers and pizza. Gross. Hit brother got him a salt lick for Christmas once. Anyway, when she was little she made chirping noises all the time, and they sounded vaguely bird-like, so she was henceforth "The Bird Cat". Very creative, I know. The bird kitty apparently has a death wish. When we were living in our very first apartment she jumped and/or fell off our second story balcony. A couple years later she ate a bunch of thread and had to have several thousand dollars of surgery and other veterinary hoopla. I guess she is not very smart. She loves me most of all and sleeps on my feet every night. Sometimes she likes to chew on my head and it kind of hurts but it is too adorable to do anything about.

This is her sister, Echo:


 

I named her after Echo from Ovid's Metamorphoses, because that's what I was reading in my Latin class at the time. And I like the myth of Echo and Narcissus a lot. Because I'm kind of weird. Anyway, she is kind of deformed and all of the bones in her tail are crunched up together in a little ball so instead of a majestic cat tail she has a little bunny poof. So naturally, we call her The Bunny Cat. (See this very creative theme...) The Bunny is madly in love with her daddy and pretty much wishes I (and the other cats) didn't exist. When Husband and I briefly broke up she stayed alone with him and I think she longs for those days. She seems, though, to have accepted that I am here to stay, so she doesn't yowl at me any time I walk into the room anymore.

Less than a year after we adopted The Bird Cat and The Bunny, they started getting really big and not so cute and kitten-y anymore, so, to bring even more cuteness into our home, we adopted yet another cat:

 

This is Lancelot. He is adorable. Clearly, however, we couldn't just use his god forsaken name and call him Lancelot, so he became known as The Kitten. I know, you didn't think it could get less creative, but it did. It's even worse, because he is so clearly not a kitten anymore, but we can't bring ourselves to call him anything else. He is friendly and loves everyone and I think he might be slightly asthmatic because he sometimes wheezes when he purrs and snores when he is napping. He loves his adopted sisters, who mostly just tolerate him, and sometimes tries to give them baths.




Last night The Bird Cat was bleeding and had a huge wound behind her ear. Looked like she had gotten into a fight. I washed her off as best I could and put some Neosporin on it and kept a close eye on things to make sure it wasn't getting infected. But when I came home from work today it was bleeding again and she had been scratching at it and I got another look at the injury and it looked a lot worse on closer inspection than it had the night before. Off too the vet, hoping they might just give her some stitches and a cone and maybe some antibiotics and we'd be out a hundred bucks or so.

Turns out she has a nasty abscess. They had to anesthetize her and put a drain in it and keep her overnight tonight. And charge us a lot of money, of course. We get to pick her up in the morning. Or rather, Husband gets to pick her up because I have to go to work. The vet called and told us that her surgery went well, but I am still feeling very sad, and I am going to miss her sleeping on my feet tonight.



It is always The Bird Kitty that gets into trouble. Maybe she should have a new nickname: The Million-Dollar Cat.

1 comment:

  1. Poor Bird Cat. Good thing you took him in when you did. I have one of those million dollar kitties, too. Inu (Japanese for dog) won himself a several night stay in the hospital from a urinary condition that nearly killed him. I still remember him coming home from the hospital and being so pitiful. He was loopy on pain meds and slept on my chest for the longest time.

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