Verily, cats are weird

My life has been on hold this week following a drastic and explosive vomiting episode on the part of my cat, Fidel, which led to him not eating or drinking for almost two days. I am using this as an excuse to postpone blogging about writerly stuff, since I honestly haven’t had a moment to think straight.

Cats are weird. My poor baby boy, who is really more of a dog than a cat in a lot of ways, is a cuddlemuffin of epic proportions, infinitely curious, and sometimes a jerk. He really, really loves ribbons, and anything stringy looking, and I can see you cat lovers wincing because you know how this story goes right? Cat loves ribbon. Cat finds ribbon in the chaos of the house post-move. Cat eats ribbon.

So Saturday night, as I lay dead to the world, I was awoken by the most terrible hurking. There is no other word for that sound. Hurk. Hurk. I shot up, to realize that my husband was gone and I was the only person in bed. The lights were all on. The hurking continued.

“What is happening?” I said groggily.

“Cat boy threw up,” said the S.O. That was…an understatement.

I didn’t take pictures, and you don’t want them, but what my poor baby threw up was nothing that should have come out of anyone’s throat. It was a hairball the size of Texas, and it had accreted around a ribbon that I recognized instantly as a wide, green ribbon I had been wondering about the past few days. Mystery solved, because this semi-digested, colorless thing was, in fact, the missing ribbon. That hairball smelled terrible, let me tell you, and my stomach is always the least stable around 3 am. I nearly brought up my dinner myself.

Anyway, gory details aside, baby boy was so traumatized that he refused to eat or drink or let anyone touch him. I can only hypothesize that he was in pain from the violent exodus of the foreign object that had been taking up most of his stomach. We had been having problems with him vomiting a little earlier in the week, and so we knew he hadn’t been eating as much as he probably should – I’d chalked it up to stress, because of the move and all, but it was now apparent that it had been his body trying to deal with the ribbon situation. Anyway, he also wasn’t grooming, and so I did what any good cat mom does and insisted we take him to the vet. The only one open on a Sunday was the emergency vet, of course, so that was buckets of fun.

Four hours and a few hundred dollars later, I had a dopey, still-not-great cat who still wouldn’t eat or drink and had a giant lump of subcutaneous fluid on his shoulder. We took him back to the vet yesterday, where they gave him antibiotics, more fluids, took more Xrays, and set him up with an appetite stimulant. He ate this morning (yay!) and is back at the vet for one more go with the Xray machine, just to make sure he doesn’t have any issues internally that could cause complications in a few days. After that it’s just feeding him and making sure he drinks.

Poor guy smells like death, and his sister is NOT having it. She keeps hissing and growling at him. Hasn’t taken a swing at him yet, at least. Between the two of them I haven’t slept much.

Anyway, here is a picture of my sweet boy looking way more awake last night, if still a bit peckish and with a terrible shave job. He followed me around the house, meowed some (though still doesn’t sound like himself) and played with his toys even! But no more ribbons for him, let me tell you what.