Crap

Chelsea’s been sounding a bit “gurgly” for the past couple of days, as if she’s growling at me while under water.  I thought it could just be a side-effect of her feeding tube, but to be safe we took her into the vet this afternoon for a quick checkup.  Normally I enjoy visiting the vet’s office (as long as none of the pets are seriously ill, of course), but we’ve been there four separate times in the past week, all for at least an hour, and it’s getting a bit tedious.  Today we did something a bit different, and used the vet’s computer to bid and win an eBay auction while we waiting for our appointment.  We’d been watching an auction which closed during the time we were still in the waiting-room, but the staff were kind enough to let us use one of their computers to access the Internet, make a bid, and ultimately win the auction.  Soon we’ll probably just take a sleeping bag and start camping in their lobby for make our lives more convenient.

So, it turns out that Chelsea has an upper respiratory infection, and she came home with Clavamox that I can just stick in her feeding tube.  She had a bandage change and a weigh-in, and has gained .4 pounds in the past 72 hours.  We came home, I fed her, and all was fine until a couple of hours later when I heard her throwing up in the hallway.  Upon further inspection she’d thrown up everything I’d fed her earlier into the litterbox, which is technically very tidy, but still sort of hard to clean up.  I think I’ll need to do a full litter change tomorrow as I just couldn’t scoop out all the liquid bits.  She then came and sat by my desk and threw up some more, but she did it on the plastic mat under my chair, so again, it was easy to wipe up.  As I was cleaning though, I noticed a little wet brown mark on the floor which looked more like poop than vomit.  I went and did a quick inspection of Chelsea’s butt (the fringe benefits of being a pet owner :p), and found her sitting on “Eli’s couch” in a big pile of her own feces.  Blech.  Blech blech blechity blech.  The only good thing is that Eli’s couch is really just a gigantic dog bed at this point, and with the sofa cover in place, the main cushions were mostly protected.  I now have to wash the sofa cover but that’s the least of my worries.  The most horrible thing was that I needed to gingerly carry Chelsea into the bathroom to try to clean off her entire rear end—legs, feet, butt, the works—because they were covered in diarrhea.  You know, if you sit in the stuff, it tends to get stuck to you.  She was NOT a happy camper about my paper towel and soap technique, and she screeched and yowled and came about this close to sinking her fangs into my hand.  She’s now (mostly) clean, the sofa is clean, the bathroom floor is clean, the litterbox is clean, and she’s asleep in the recliner.  In retrospect I don’t think she’s pooped in an eternity (certainly not in the last week that I’m aware of), so I’m sure she’s back-logged and constipated, and perhaps the pain of that made her vomit.  She’s a tidy cat and certainly not one to poop outside the litterbox if she can help it—I can’t imagine her purposely laying in her own feces.  Aren’t you glad you read this entry tonight?

Okay, so now we get to the good part.  Right after I wrote the above paragraph, I heard a scratching sound coming from the other room.  I thought it sounded just like a cat digging around in a litterbox, except there’s no litterbox in the area from where the sound is coming.  I go in the room, turn on the light, and Chelsea has had more diarrhea which she’s trying to cover up.  The effort was in vain, as the poop is in the middle of Eli’s $200 Orvis Indestructible Dog Bed.  Arrrggghhh!  Now we’re washing a load of laundry which includes the dog bed cover and the towel which was on the recliner and which had some poop on it.  In a few minutes we’ll put in a second load (ha! that’s like a “poop pun"), the sofa cover.  In the interim I completely changed out one litterbox and put all new litter in it, and I retrieved the smaller, “backup” litterbox and stuck it in the livingroom so it’s closer to Chelsea.  I’m afraid to go to bed.  I’m afraid to wake up.  I don’t want to find whatever surprises I might find in the morning.

I’ve read a lot about blogs lately, and about how some people feel they serve no purpose.  I think that by writing three big paragraphs about my cat’s bowel problems I’ve perhaps proven that theory.

Posted by Leigh-Ann on 02/17 at 07:56 PM

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