Side Effects

Our cat Potter has given us more than her fair share of scares. On multiple occasions we have carted her off, clawing and howling, to the vet or the Pet ER when things looked dire. I've never tallied up exactly how much we have spent on her medical care, mostly because it would depress me too much. Don't get me wrong, I love my kitty and would go the extra mile to make sure she is okay, but on every single occasion the results have been inconclusive, and basically, she just got better on her own. Thousands and thousands of dollars have been spent on what time alone fixed.

She's always been a puker. At least once a week, sometimes more often, sometimes less, she would revisit upon us her lunch. But lately things have been bad. Because of her history, we were hesitant to rush her to the vet, spend a ton of money and get no answers. However, after weeks and weeks of her throwing up A LOT, as in multiple times a day and on our bed on more than one occasion, we finally decided to take her in.

OF COURSE, the vet couldn't find anything wrong with her. All bloodwork came back fine. The diagnosis, such as it was, was that hair must be accumulating in her digestive tract and causing a backup. So the vet prescribed her Catlax, a molasses-like substance that serves in much the same way as Exlax does on humans. Which is to say, it greases the chute.

You might think this would cause a disturbing litter box situation, but in fact had almost no effect on that end. And at first, the vomiting slowed down and we thought "HALLELUJAH! We're on the right track."

But then we woke up Friday morning.

It was a morning like any other. Sophie woke us up at ohgod o'clock. We went through the upstairs part of our morning: pottying, face washing, changing diaper, putting on warmer clothes; before we headed for the stairs. And that was when I saw it.

It was everywhere.

It was on every step from the top to the bottom. That's thirteen steps. It was on the wall from the top nearly to the bottom. And there was clearly a spray pattern. It was like something had stood at the top of the stairs and a fire hose of vomit shot out of it. I didn't need Dexter or a team of CSIs to figure out what had happened.

I called out to Neil. When he met me at the top of the stairs, his mouth fell open and he said, only half kidding, "Do you think she's alive?" I'd had the same thought myself. It was an explosion. I have never seen an animal produce that kind of mess. HazMat teams usually deal with this sort of thing.

I went downstairs to track down Potter to confirm that she was, in fact, still among the land of the living. I found her in the kitchen circling her food dish waiting for some breaky as if nothing had happened. After refilling her bowl, I headed back upstairs to clean that ungodly mess up. It took a half a bottle of 409 and an entire roll of paper towels, but our stairs are back to their pre-disaster state.

We called the vet's office as soon as they opened and it was decided that we take a break from the Catlax and proceed to the next level of treatment: prednisone. So now our 7 lb cat is on steroids.

The good news is that the puking has slowed down to once a day for the last three days and we're optimistic that things are on the up and up. The bad news is that she's got acne and her meow is three octaves lower.

Whatever. As long as I never have to clean a mess like that again.