In which Cat gets his a** kicked and costs me a few hundred bucks

Hey, not every post can be about babies, pregnancy, and parenthood. To paraphrase my wife, our impending addition is only the center of our universe, not THE universe.

I have never gone out of my way to hide my disdain for Cat. He was brought into our home on my wife’s wishes and has never paid her an ounce of attention since his first day. Instead, he reserves the bulk of his “affections,” for lack of a better term, for the human being in the house that really couldn’t care less about him (that would be yours truly). Cats can’t actually feel affection - just possessiveness. When you think your cat is loving on you they are really just marking you as a personal possession. You are the machine that delivers food, and little more.

Despite my borderline hostility toward Cat, I would not knowingly allow him to die if there were something I could do to prevent it, if only because my wife would never let me hear the end of it. It is this weakness in my resolve that Cat takes advantage of by taking his life in his own hands, and leaving me to pick up the pieces.

In this week’s installment of life with Cat, Cat managed to get his butt kicked - or to be more literal, bitten - by another animal. Probably another cat. And, to be fair, we haven’t see “the other guy” so to say Cat got his butt kicked is making certain assumptions about his fight-worthiness. Probably, those assumptions are warranted, but let us not digress. He came home this weekend after a night of prowling the neighborhood, looking for all the world like nothing was bothering him except for the failure of breakfast to appear before him at his whim. Except he had a nasty, roundish, oozing wound in the center of a bald spot on his rear, near his tail. Awesome.

All of this would be a mildly diverting tale and nothing more except for one thing: A cat bite is apparently the suburban wildlife equivalent of shooting up with a hypodermic needle full of raw sewage. The bite (again, located on Cat’s butt) turned necrotic. Ever smelled gangrene before? It is not in my top ten favorite smells of all time.

I dropped him off at the vet Monday morning, caterwauling from his carrier. The last time we had to drop him off for a procedure was when he got fixed. His procedure was slightly more involved than normal, and he came away with stitches and one of those ridiculous head cones, which pleased me greatly. And then, despite the vet’s assurances that he would sleep for three days, he got out of his cone and split his stitches within five minutes of arriving home. We were back at the vet within fifteen minutes. This did not please me.

A few hundred bucks later, we again have a cat with a head cone. It would be almost comical if not for the pathetic look of the rest of him - shaved from the mid-back to the tail, with a drain stuck in the bite wound. No stitches this time - can’t really do that with an abscess, so at least that’s one less thing to worry about. Also, our house is now pleasantly serenaded by the constant meowing from the upstairs bathroom. Cat has to stay quarantined away from Beagle and Auxiliary Dog (just to keep them from messing with the drain or the cone). He is thrilled with this.

This is how our week started. It can only get better, right?