This is how I turned 30: standing in my bathroom wearing nothing but a pair of latex gloves, holding a wet cat in mid-air.
The cat (named J
, no, not after the agent in Men in Black, although you might think that looking at the cat, as his fur is, for the most part, black, but still, no, he predates the movie by several years, thanks so much for asking, you’re the first person to ever think of that — no, really, that’s quite clever, I’ll have to write that down) had suddenly started pissing all over the place. Cat urine, for those who don’t know, is quite pungent, and left untreated, it not only dries and crystalizes (an effect which the veterinarian later described as quite cool
, okay lady, whatever, you really need to get out more), it can eat through hardwood floors and other nasty things that don’t bear elucidating. Suffice to say it’s strong. We had thought he was just being mean and, pardon the expression, pissy, but a friend of ours clued us in to the little cat secret that this was probably a urinary tract infection. He’s so ornery most of the time, we hardly noticed the difference.
So on Friday afternoon, I rounded him up, a process which took 15 minutes and half a spray bottle of water and a nasty gash under my right thumbnail and almost involved dismantling the bed frame, and took him to the vet.
The veterinarian poked him in the ear with a thermometer (so much easier than the earlier models!
which apparently were administered rectally) and generally felt him up until she was satisfied that there was nothing earth-shatteringly wrong with him, which was nice to know in a not admitting that we’ve been considering getting rid of him anyway
kind of way, and then whisked him away to a back room. I took the opportunity to use the sink to wash my right thumb, and tried to scrape away some of the dried blood from waaaay under the nail, and generally tried to feel cleaner. Ten minutes later, vet + cat came back and she confirmed that J does indeed have a UTI, but she couldn’t get enough of a urine sample to tell whether it’s anything more serious (how she got any sample
at all is a question best left unpondered), but she gave me some pills and instructions and told me to bring him back when the pills ran…
Hold everything, J is pissing in the sink. This excites the vet to no end, because perhaps now we can get that larger sample
we were hoping for, and lucky me, I get to watch how it’s done. (It involves standing in front of the cat with a test tube and waiting for exactly the right moment, not unlike that old Far Side cartoon of the man standing with a fork in front of his waffle iron captioned slave to the waffle light
, a thought which floated through my mind at the time but didn’t seem nearly as funny as the original cartoon… perhaps if I hadn’t just used the sink myself, it would have been funnier.) But alas, we still don’t get a large enough sample, and man + cat will need to come back in two weeks to do all this again.
Now the fun begins.
I get J home, and he’s feeling a bit woozy, having just been given a strong antibiotic for the UTI. He eats a little food, promptly throws it up, and gingerly proceeds upstairs, where he throws up in no less than 3 different rooms, one after another. He is throwing up faster than I can clean up after him, and attempts to catch him and exile him into a single room without a carpet fail miserably. It’s somewhere in the middle of this cat-and-vomit game that Dora (nicknamed D
, no, not after the cat) comes home. Like a work-at-home dad who’s dealt with a cholicy baby all day and needs a rest, I kiss her on the cheek, give her the 10 second summary of the vet visit and the current situation, hand her the carpet cleaner and the paper towels, and go downstairs.
The cat continues to whine mercilessly throughout dinner, only pausing to disappear upstairs and vomit. At approximately 10:15, D (who has now completely taken over the job of following the cat around and mopping up) calls out my name in an urgent voice. Not an oh look here’s another one
voice, but an oh shit get your ass in here
voice. The vomiting has escalated; J is now vomiting blood. OK. Call the vet; of course it’s 10 o’clock at night, the vet is closed, we get the answering machine. If this is a horse-related emergency, press 1.
God, I love living in a newly-developed rural area. If this is some other farm animal-related emergency, press 2.
The mind reels. If this is any other type of small animal emergency, please call our partner 24-hour small animal care center at …
Scribble, scribble, dial.
At moments like this, I always feel that I need to prove myself to the person who answers the phone. You know, some way of getting the point across that I’m not just another random feline hypochondriac calling the animal ER in the middle of the night because my cat has a hangnail; I actually have problems. Hello? Yes, my cat is vomiting blood…
This seems to satisfy him, he gives me directions, and off we go, J and D and I, barreling down Route 1 at 85 miles an hour, cat mewing furiously in the back seat, D being anxious, me wondering silently what I would say to the police if they stopped me for traveling at such ridiculous speeds (gotta go, we’re going to the ER, my cat is vomiting blood, you can escort me and arrest me when we get there, but we gotta go
), the cat going mysteriously silent and me saying morbid things like poke the cat to make sure he’s still alive
and D does and J mews and we go on.
The animal ER is easy to find but small and unassuming, nothing like a people ER, which has big bucks and an entire industry behind it. There is no line, we walk right and announce that we were the ones whose cat was vomiting blood, and go right in to examination room B (out of A
and B
, as I said, small and unassuming). We fill out a brief consent form (it’s your fault he’s sick, and if he gets worse, that’s your fault too
) and explain to the attendant what the symptoms have been to date, which he dutifully writes down on a chart
. The attendant pokes and prods J and generally feels him up, determines that there’s nothing earth-shatteringly wrong with him, and then asks for my assistance in holding J down so he can take J’s temperature rectally. Did you know there’s a new version of these that work in the ear?
I do not idly inquire. Shove it up your ass,
he does not testily reply. No, ear,
I helpfully correct. And so forth, a little conversation going on in my head to drown out the utter ridiculousness of the situation.
The attendant leaves, a seemingly infinite amount of time passes, and finally the real doctor comes in, looks at the paperwork we’ve filled out, looks at the chart
that the attendant filled out, and starts explaining her hypotheses of the situation. It’s like a farce, a badly acted audience participation sketch by an improv comedy troupe where the actors try to act like doctors but don’t really know how, and the audience members try to act like patients but don’t know what to say. She explains that they’ll do some tests, and that we’ll know the results in just a few minutes, and then she whisks J away and leaves the two of us sitting there, in a examination room B in the animal ER, wondering aloud what we could have done to prevent this (answer we learned later: not much above and beyond what we’re already doing) and whether we’ll ever be ready to be real parents at some indeterminate time in the future (answer: no, you’re never ready, you just do it), and generally giving each other ulcers, until finally the doctor comes back and announces that the tests look good but they’d like to keep J for observation for 24 hours, and that if that’s all right with us, then the attendant will meet us at the front desk to settle the bill. To which I think but don’t say, Let me get this straight: we give you the money, and we give you the cat… and then we can go?
But all I really said was, K. He’s all yours. See ya tomorrow.
But wait, there’s more.
Saturday evening I got my first (early) birthday present: a trip to a day spa for a couples massage
, which is to say we both strip naked and go into a room where buff gay men in their mid 30’s rub us with lotions and pretend to enjoy it while we pretend not to. Ignoring, for the time being, the homoerotic overtones of such a gift, let me just say that I have never seen so much fake serenity in one place. David Lanz on the speakers, executive-quality miniature waterfalls on the front desk, soothing smells pumped through the HVAC system, cool pastel colors on the walls, and naturally, a wide variety of potions and elixirs for sale in every corner. The greatest charlatans of the 19th century have nothing on these people. To top it off, we were running late, because we had gone jogging together earlier that afternoon in the public park on the 2-mile jogging path that wraps around the lake (now that’s serene) and were late getting back and washing up, so we ended up barreling down Route 1 in a futile attempt to make it on time to the fake serene day spa, at which no less than three people went out of their way to make it clear that we were late and that we would therefore not be receiving the full massage which we had rightfully paid for, since, serenity or not, they had a tight schedule to keep.
After the abbreviated massage, which was nothing to write home about in any case, we made the best of the situation by having sex in the steam room.
After our first and last experience at the day spa, we swung back past the animal ER, to see how the cat was getting on. Plan for the night: pick up the cat, swing by the movie theater to get advance tickets for a later showing of the new Bond film, drop the cat off at home, and take our brains off the hook for a few hours staring at Halle Berry. We went back into examination room B (by this point, I was beginning to suspect that examination room A was really a janitor’s closet), and in due course, the doctor appeared to tell us that J was just fine, thanks, the more serious tests all came back negative, he wasn’t dehydrated, she had had a bit of trouble administering the medication to him because he wouldn’t eat the cheap food and they had to grind up the pill and mix it in with the expensive stuff (That’s our cat!
), but he hadn’t thrown up all day, not even after taking the medication, so she was confident that he could come home with us, but if there were any complications, we should call, yadda yadda, thanks for your help, bye bye.
We put him in the cat carrier, threw him in the back seat, and got halfway to the movie theater before he pissed himself.
Now, for those who don’t know, let me assure you that cat urine is even more pungent in the confines of a small space like, say, a car. Even with all the windows open and the air vents on full blast and the car barreling down Route 1 at 85 miles an hour, the smell is not to be trifled with. We stopped just long enough for D to hop out of the car and buy the tickets (damn if we weren’t going to let a little thing like this spoil our evening), which was more than enough time to discover how much the air flow generated by barreling down Route 1 at 85 miles an hour had really been helping keep the smell from becoming overwhelming, and then we were off again.
Out of the car, up the stairs to the master bathroom (the only one in the house whose shower has a door that can be closed and entirely sectioned off), put the cat carrier in the shower, turn on the water, strip naked, put on the latex gloves so I can shampoo the cat, hop in the shower, dump the cat out of the carrier, wash out the urine that’s left in the carrier, hand the cat carrier over the shower wall to D, who is standing on the edge of the bathtub to reach up far enough to grab the carrier and drop it in the bathtub, and also to hand me the cat shampoo which I, in my haste, had previously forgotten, catch the cat, which, even in this 4 x 4 space, is no small feat, grab the shampoo, lather, rinse, repeat, step out of the shower, wrap the cat in an appointed cat towel
, rub vigorously until cat appears to stop actively dripping, send D downstairs to retrieve cat brush (which we use far too seldom and therefore can not easily find on the first try), hold down angry cat and brush back and sides thoroughly, then grab angry cat by the nape of the neck and hold up in midair to brush stomach…
Which, if I remember correctly, is where we came in.
So this is how I turned 30: surrounded by loved ones, and cat urine. Loved ones and cat urine. It could be worse.
Oh, and we did get back to the theater in time to see the Bond movie. It’s exciting, in a Hollywood sort of way, but it just can’t compare to real life.
