Adventures of Herbie – Part 1

In honor of my vacation, I am taking a break in both format and content from my normal blogging to share some stories about my cat. He has been a great comic relief and distraction in what would have otherwise been a more difficult week. Many people have told me I need to write these stories down, so here they are! Hopefully you guys are pet people, otherwise you will probably think we are crazy, like we used to think about pet people were. I know SOME of you aren't cat fans (GIMH), but I'm sure if you met our little angel, you would love him.

You endo ladies will love this – my cat had to have a laparotomy on July 4^th. And let me tell you, it is expensive to bring a cat surgeon in on a federal holiday! It all started on the Thursday before the 4^th. When my hubs got home, he noticed that the cat had gotten sick. We didn't think much about it. All day Friday we were at home and we noticed that though the cat seemed to be hungry, he wasn't eating. We thought maybe he was rejecting his new food (we had just switched him from kitten to cat food the week before). So I went to the store and got him a different kind of food. He ate some of it that evening, but then got sick again. After that, he started getting sick every 20-30 minutes. He would be sleeping, and then all of a sudden he would stand up, make a funny meow, and then get sick. When my husband would hear the meow, he would jump up and grab a paper towel and try to put it under the cat before he could get sick on the carpet. At about 10:30 pm, my hubs had been looking stuff up online and said he thought we needed to take the cat into an emergency clinic. I was trying to put it off as I was tired and the clinic was 20-30 minutes away, and who knows how long we would be there. My parents have a cat about the same age who had done the same thing the weekend before and she ended up just having a stomach bug and got sent home with anti-nausea medicine. He seemed to do fine during the night, and the next morning he was purring and playing a bit, but he still wouldn't eat or drink anything. Then he started getting sick again, so we knew it was time to take him in.

At the vet hospital, they recommended that we do hundreds of dollars worth of tests. The first thing they did was and x-ray and sure enough they found something. They came in and showed us the x-ray and there was some stringy looking stuff wound up in his stomach. We were trying to figure out what it could be. We thought it might be a guitar string as my hubs had just changed his strings the weekend before and the cat was playing with them. But he said he counted all his strings before he threw them out, and it seemed like he would have problems earlier if it was really a guitar string. They recommended surgery of course, and we okayed it. They said the surgery would be about an hour, maybe a bit longer depending on what they found.

They gave us a call at 2:30 to say they were going into surgery. At 5:00, we were getting ready to head to our friend's house, so I asked the hubs to call and check on the cat. Still in surgery… By the time we got to our friend's house at 5:30, I was ready to cry. I thought that we had waited too long to bring him and it was all my fault for not listening to my husband. At 6:30, one of the doctors called me. She said they were still sewing him up, but she wanted to give us an update. They had opened him up and started palpitating all his organs when they felt something in his small intestine. Not only did he have something in his stomach, but he had something in his intestine too! It turned out to be one of those plastic screw covers that they give you to use on put-it-together-yourself furniture. In his stomach, they found two ponytail holders! One had been chewed in half and the other he swallowed whole!

A few months back the cat had somehow figured out that he could get the screw covers off our furniture and he would pull them off and then run away. We have baggies full of screw covers that the cat had pulled off, but I guess he found one that we didn't know about. Then a few weeks ago, he started really getting into my ponytail holders. He would grab them off my nightstand in the middle of the night and take off. We'd find them throughout the house in the morning. It had run through my mind a couple times that maybe he shouldn't be playing with those, but I didn't think he would actually eat them. Kitty was to spend the night at the hospital and we were supposed to call the next morning to see if he was ready to be picked up.

So this is the end of Part 1, which actually isn't too entertaining, but the stories get better from here, so keep tuning in!