Friday Cat Blogging

No cute pictures for this one, folks.

As some of you may know, we at Casa La Brilliant have been dealing with an intermittent mouse problem. For all I know, it's not intermittent at all, given the assertions by one handyman and two exterminators in the aftermath of the Great Squirrel Adventure of 2007 that there are one hell of a lot of mouse droppings inside the celotex ceiling in the basement.

Maggie the Idiot cat is, for all her stupidity, quite the little predator. She usually takes care of the various pantry moths and spiders who manage to find their way into our little abode, while Miss Jenny sits placidly on the bench in front of the living room window saying "Fuck that...you do it. I spent a year fending for myself in a park before I was rescued and I'm retired." For all that Jenny was the stray, it's Maggie who parades around the house with a crocheted ball in her mouth yowling.

And yet she has caught absolutely nothing.

Last spring I went around the entire perimeter of the house with a can of expanding foam, a bundle of steel wool, a tube of Phenoseal caulk, and a caulking gun and closed up everything that looked like so much as a caterpillar could get in. And still there are droppings in the garage, and I've even found droppings in my kitchen base cabinets a few months ago, which caused much hue and cry and use of Pine-Sol as I scrubbed the cabinets out, trying mightily not to retch.

Earlier this week, Maggie began finding the kitchen base cabinets fascinating again. Sometimes I think she just does this to fuck with us. It's her way of doing that thing of chasing something nonexistent on the wall. Of course savvy cat owners know that what they're looking at is greeblings, but greeblings are not commonly found in kitchen cabinets. Now, there are no signs of new mouse droppings in the kitchen, but when Maggie begins staring intently at the corner where the blind corner cabinet and the sink base cabinet meet, I immediately smell a -- well, let's not get carried away here -- a mouse.

Since it's time for our annual termite inspection, I called our trusty exterminator with a heart of gold and called him out to kill two pests with one stone.

When I arrived home yesterday, "Bob" (not his real name) the exterminator and Mr. Brilliant were at the computer foraging through HP's web site for information on how to deal with "Bob"'s fried PC. Outside our home office was a closed bucket that I just assumed was the one "Bob" carries around with him for deposit of mouse corpses. I should have known when Maggie showed interest in the bucket to close her in the bedroom upstairs, but I had just gotten home. By the time I put the milk in the refrigerator, there was Maggie next to the bucket, having pried it open and knocked a piece of Final Blox onto the floor -- because in Maggie's world, EVERYTHING is a cat toy.

It became clear that whatever little tiny bit she had bitten off this block had proven unpalatable and spit out, given the little pink crumbs on the floor, but suddenly we were faced with the same issue that faced me in 1996, when I had been bitten by a cat in Antigua: you can take your chances, but if you're wrong, there's no turning back. After the Antigua incident, I elected to do the whole rabies thing, and with this I elected to start the ball rolling to get Maggie treated.

I called our vet's office and was told to call the Animal Poison Control hotline for a treatment recommendation. This hotline is set up by the ASPCA, and for sixty bucks you get to talk to a vet versed in poison issues. Bottom line: we either do blood tests Saturday and Sunday, or put her on Vitamin K-1 for 30 days, but either way, she has to be seen by a vet. Our vet is only in for three hours on Friday, so off Maggie and I went to the local Big Impersonal Animal Hospital, where it costs you $160 just to walk in the door. I managed to get out of there for only $170 -- the emergency fee plus the cost of the first K-1 treatment, but now we are going to have to medicate this idiot cat for 30 days and then get her a blood test.

There's plenty of blame to go around here, and at this point the priority is to get Maggie what she needs. Of more concern is the heart murmur that the vet at the BIAH says she has and which warrants an echocardiogram -- a murmur that our vet has never heard. Of course, the BIAH is ferociously aggressive about treatment, which is one reason we stopped using them with our previous generation of cats after they were going to charge us $700 in 1987 to repair a dislocated knee for one of our cats -- when a less-invasive surgery was done by another vet for half that. So the BIAH is sort of like taking your car to the dealer for service -- you always suspect that they're trying to sell you services you don't need. I'm not knocking the BIAH at all; it's a godsend that it's there, even if they do charge you one arm, one leg, and your first-born child just to walk in the door. And it's supposedly one of the best animal hospitals in the country. But until my vet tells me there's a cause for concern, color me skeptical. It's something to be checked out when she goes for her blood test.

The irony is that I had just spent a chunk of time yesterday explaining to a co-worker that her daughter's vomiting cat should see a vet because cats will get into ANYTHING.

And as far as Maggie's concerned, the world is her oyster. Or her batty bag. Or her bally. Or her crumpled cigarette pack. Or her milk jug ring.