The Ducks Wreak Their Vengeance
I suppose I should start all of this out by saying that this particular rant isn't really my cats' fault this time. But it doesn't mean that, although they are my little furballs and one of the delights of my existence at the same time, they are not annoying anyway. After all, I AM up and awake writing this at 7:30 on a Saturday morning for a reason.
I should also add that this rant is specifically not poor Captain Trips's fault. Which isn't to say that she is without her share of feline annoyances, being particularly prone to midnight hairballs and occasionally deciding in her warped little feline mind that her litterbox isn't where she thought it was, which consequently results in some issues (the second-to-last of which ended in us having to replace the living room carpet. Luckily our landlord is super nice and only made us pay for about 1/3 of it, which probably had something to do with the fact that also luckily it was an old carpet anyway).
This rant is all about E-twink, who admittedly can't help her physical shortcomings. And it is a looooooong one, so saddle up if you're interested and get the hell out of Dodge if you're not...
E-twink is probably my favorite out of the zoo, although don't tell the other ones I said this. We raised her from a 4-week-old kitten that had been dumped on the side of the road, and she is very affectionate and tightly bonded to us. BUT...she has some sort of skin issues, and always has. Since she was a kitten, her face has gotten really severe cat acne (the grey crusty stuff that some cats get on their chins, except she got it on her chin, mouth, and cheeks) and her ears have been full of damp brown goo that was related somehow to the acne. All of our vets in the various places we've lived have thought that this is an allergy of some sort; they've recommended everything from food changes to antibiotics to even a daily dose of some pretty severe steroids (that was Dr. Dave at the Bloomington Cat Hospital here in Bloomington, as a warning to fellow B-toners, and we left his clinic after that, because he didn't even want to test her or anything to see what the allergy was and if such a drastic measure would even be effective).
Jeremy and I have decided that this is pretty much a seasonal environmental thing, possibly related to our use of the climate control in our various houses, because she completely clears up on her own in the spring and fall. And it seems to have declined in severity as she's gotten older; she used to scratch her poor face bloody, and no matter how often we cleaned her ears, she would shake her head and spray nasty ear gunk everywhere (charming when she is laying on your pillow with you at night, let me tell you). But more recently she has begun to manifest a phenomenon we like to call "Gibbon Ass": her bottom alternates between states of extreme dirtiness and neon redness as she first won't have anything to do with it and then cleans it obsessively.
We mentioned the Gibbon Ass to our excellent vet out at Combs Vet Clinic the last time the kitties were in for their shots. The Combs folks are quite familiar with her unidentified allergies, and they were the ones who ran the first tests on her: she didn't respond significantly to any of the tests for environmental factors, weirdly enough, and they think it must be a food allergy of some kind, although we tried the special z/d low-allergen stuff with no result (at $17 for a 3-pound bag, for two cats for 3 months, since you can't feed one cat one thing and the other another if you don't have the time to stand over them and police them as they eat. This resulted in the added indignity of having to buy tuna-flavored hairball laxative for Captain Trips, since she started ejecting them just about every 15 minutes once we weren't feeding them the hairball care stuff any more. The laxative, for anyone who is curious, goes over about as well with the cat in question as you would think, "tuna" flavor or no).
Anyway, the vet mentioned that Science Diet has come out with a new line of prescription food: d/d, which is for cats with skin allergies. The Combs vets are nice people, but they are still of the opinion that this is some sort of food allergy. Granted, all of the Twink's symptoms ARE classic food allergy symptoms, up to and including the Gibbon Ass (or the "anal irritation", as the vet puts it; whichever you prefer). But since the acne and ear stuff has come and gone on its own regardless of what we are feeding her, we are a little skeptical. But, sighing because we have spent well over $1000 on the Twinkus throughout the course of her life unsuccessfully trying to combat her allergies (and because I was not looking forward to more daily tuna laxative administrations to poor Trips), I agreed to try it. After all, it was for skin allergies, which seems to be what the Twink has...
So I had to choose between three flavors of the d/d: Venison & Green Pea, Rabbit & Green Pea, and Duck & Green Pea. As a vegetarian, this was a hard choice for me. Don't get me wrong: I have never for a moment even considered making any of the critters go vegetarian, and even if I did I wouldn't think about the cats, because every single scientific study done on the subject shows that cats will eventually go blind and die without animal protein, no matter what the extremists on my end of the dietary choice spectrum say. But the desire to not consume food products that result in animal death and the necessity of purchasing such food for the pets I consider part of my family remains one of my largest personal philosophical conflicts. Anyway, I wound up going with the Duck variation. I'm opposed to deer hunting in general (although I know that this is not where they would get the meat, but it doesn't seem quite right to farm deer for meat either, although I don't have a rational reason why not); I don't know if I could look the rabbits in our yard in the eye ever again; and ducks are the only animal that has ever personally attacked me. Many times. And when I was trying to feed them bread, no less. And the ducks are still proving to be obnoxious even after they have been made into cat food, because this stuff is the worst smelling cat food I have EVER encountered, hands down. And it's DRY KIBBLE, which to me makes its reek even more baffling.
**warning: graphic cat vomit descriptions below. And for those of you who know what I'm talking about, I don't mean Episode 3.**
So what does all of this have to do with last night? We've been feeding them this new food for about two weeks now. Well, the night before last the Twink puked right after she ate this duck stuff. No big deal, she does occasionally gorge herself too quickly and get sick. So I cleaned it up--and it smells even LESS pleasant after having been regurgitated, no matter how minimal the digestion was, I might add--and went on my mildly irritated way, thinking nothing about it.
But last night, I fed them and then we went to bed. I then heard the familiar hurking noise that every cat owner dreads at night, and leapt out of the bed. When our cats start vomiting, we grab them and shut them in the bathroom until we are sure they are done, because otherwise in the manner of cats they will seek out the carpet on which to eject, and particularly now we don't want to have to explain to the landlord while the nice new rug is already stained. So I caught the Twink--and chasing a vomiting but still running cat is an adventure unto itself--chucked her into the bathroom, and went to clean up the rug...and found only a very small pile with a little bit of kibble in it. So she wasn't gorging herself...I found a couple of other small piles of bile that she had left in various places in the course of her flight from the imminent bathroom imprisonment (because despite the fact that Duck food vomit is amazing in that it matches the color of our nice new carpet almost exactly, that shit is still VERY easily trackable by the smell), and she puked a couple of times more in the bathroom. When she was finally done, I let her out and then went and cleaned up the bathroom, and she seemed fine...
...until about 2 in the morning, when she started the horrible hurking noise again. This time she was laying on my feet, and I am very sorry to report that I kicked her off the bed. My only defense is that while I was immediately woken as all cat owners are by subconscious alarm at the Nighttime Vomiting noise, I was still mostly asleep at the time, and instinctively wanted to get the source of the stinky duck vomit away from me (and away from the bed, which would have sucked to have to change at 2am). However, as previously indicated, the Twink HATES being shut in the bathroom and has become quite an accomplished mobile vomiter. In her flight out of the bedroom, she immediately retaliated for this indignity by projectile-nailing some laundry and the dog's bed (and even the dog was having no part of the duck vomit, although ordinarily he is quite disgustingly happy to aid in cat vomit cleanup and has to be energetically restrained from doing so). It seemed she had gone to eat some more food right before coming to lay on my feet, because the small amount of kibble that was in the puke was barely digested, though still hideously stinky. And the small amounts of vomit and bile observed in the earlier incident were repeated throughout the house.
**graphic descriptions of cat vomit concluded**
Very long story not-so-short, while we had our doubts about the Twink having a food allergy before, it certainly seems that there is some sort of reaction going on with the evil Duck food in particular. I suppose it could be that she ate some sort of household object that is stopping her up...Jolly Ranchers are a current fad in our house, and Trips has been consuming any overlooked wrappers with great glee and crapping them out again with great anguish. While the Twink's taste runs more to paper (and, more specifically, to our tabletop game character sheets when she can get them), it isn't impossible that she has also got a hold of a candy wrapper, or some other small and consumable object. I am currently testing that hypothesis by feeding them some of their regular food that I still had left over (because of course I had just bought a new bag when the evil duck food was suggested by the vet, but I had opened it and fed them maybe three meals out of it, so I couldn't return it either), and seeing if she pukes again. But I am in the back room with the music and space heater going. This is my way of saying "LA LA LA LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU" to the cat vomit noise, and then my husband will have to be the one to deal with cleaning up any mess. I am very annoyed with him right now, because when all this started early yesterday evening, we were laying in bed reading together, and I was deep in the throes of a book (I'm just starting to read Good Omens) and he alerted me to the cat hurking by kicking me (albeit relatively gently) in the shin and saying "the cat's puking" without putting his own book down. I was pretty irritated at the time, but luckily for him I was more alarmed by the cat puking and was so annoyed at the Twink after chasing her around that I temporarily forgot about this small rudeness. But only temporarily. So now it can be his turn to deal with it.
This is, however, a dangerous proposition, because at this point Jeremy is at the point of vicious exhaustion and probably won't do anything about cleaning up a mess even if he does hear it occurring. And this brings me to the current point of my story. The second time the cat was shut in the bathroom, I shut both of them in there, because I was exhausted and still half-asleep, and had stepped in some of the little piles of yak while I was chasing the cat in the dark, and I just wanted to clean up the rug (and my feet) and go to bed and deal with anything on the bathroom tile in the morning. And the other cat had to go in the bathroom too, because that is where the litter box is. So I returned to bed and after some grumbling and shoving of my cold (but clean) wet feet behind Jeremy's knees, I went back to sleep. However, the Twink is the most vocal cat I have ever known, and I've worked at 2 vet clinics so I've known a lot of them. This is entirely my fault, because she is part Siamese and when she was a kitten and learning to vocalize, I encouraged it because I thought at the time it was very cute to have conversations with the kitty. So she has been shut in the bathroom twice now--and in fact, had been shut in the bathroom for much of the day, and when the sirens go off the cats get stuffed in the bathroom then, too. This is my compromise between putting them in their carriers and leaving them to go free, as it let them have a little more freedom to walk around than being shut in their carriers would, but also makes them easily obtainable should fleeing to the basement become necessary.
At any rate, the Twink had had just about enough of the bathroom and began to tell us so, quite loudly, at some unidentified point in the course of the night. In addition, Trips began making noise too; she is not as vocal, but she does get bored and start exploring cabinets. And she can't just pull one all the way open and go in; she has to pull it gently until it opens a couple inches and thumps closed, and then repeat the process, opening it a little farther each time until it finally gets open and stays open long enough for her to slip inside. Between Trips thumping the cabinets and the Twink puking and yowling, it was quite the auditory circus. Luckily for me, I am a sound sleeper, and so the only effect it had on me until early this morning was that throughout all of my dreams, the Twink followed me around meowing, and I couldn't figure out how to get her to stop.
Jeremy, however, is NOT a sound sleeper. Once we went on an ill-fated trip with buzzermccain, her significant other, and three other friends where we all rented a cabin that had 5 plywood bunks and 1 "double-sized" bunk that was supposedly big enough for two people. This was all great fun while we were awake, but no one had brought enough padding for the bunks, and in addition to the discomfort experienced by all, the light sleepers were forced to try and sleep around all of the various snorings and other nighttime noises of the heavier sleepers. Which meant that Jeremy (and buzzermccain, also a light sleeper, who was sharing the "double" bunk with her boyfriend, a heavy sleeper, and, as Jeremy--who had the bunk above them--reports, was engaged in "titanic land wars for territory" all night) got no sleep whatsoever, and as a result, reached similar states of vicious exhaustion, a term I use quite conscientiously. On the trip with our friends, his social conditioning (such as it is) kept him from simply snapping and killing us all. But this morning, he had no such compunctions.
I had been slightly awake for a few minutes, listening to the cat screech and wondering to myself how long it would be before my annoyance with the (admittedly somewhat justified) yowling provided enough impetus for me to leave the warmth of the bed and go release the cat from her captivity. However, I was awake enough to witness Jeremy finally snap. He flung back the covers (uncovering me in the process), stalked to the bathroom door, and yanked it open. Since I was already uncovered and my warmth was fading fast, I decided that it would be in my best interest to go and remove whatever remained of the evil duck food from the bowl, as indeed that was where the Twink (who was known as "Rotunda" and "the kitty cantaloupe" in the days in which we used to free-feed them and just keep their bowls full all the time) immediately headed.
So I sprinted for the bowls just ahead of the feline stampede, exchanged the evil duck food for the regular stuff, and fed the dog as well. And headed back here to immediately pour out this story to my adoring friends here on LJ. So here ends my tale, which has been about two hours in the telling. I now desperately have to go visit the bathroom myself...hopefully there will be no messes for me to clean up. And hopefully Jeremy will stay asleep long enough for me to get some WoW time in. Which is almost a certainty, given the disruptions to his schedule caused by Round 1 and 2 of cat vomit and the continual auditory disturbances on the part of the unjustly imprisoned felines.
I hope that the latest account of Terri and Jeremy's Nighttime Pet Adventures (of which there are many) was at least somewhat amusing :) Have a good day, all....