It's been a long & very eventful summer. Dylan had the whole summer off (10 weeks) and we had some great (and hilarious) family bonding time - which I'll talk about in a different post. Right now there is a more pressing issue at hand. My cat.
Back in May I tried to install a new faucet in the kitchen sink. Long story short, I forgot to turn off the main water and ended up soaking myself, my kitchen and my cat while turning the downstairs into what felt like a tropical rainforest (humidity and all). Luckily for me, my dad was flying in that night and could help me fix it. Unfortunately, I think it caused my cat some trauma from which he suffered PTSD. He had what I can only imagine was a nervous breakdown and acted schizo all summer, refusing to come inside, pretending to not recognize us (and no this wasn't only when Dylan was fishing the Wall Street Journal out of the bushes in his boxers). Flash forward to a week and 1/2 ago. Mr. Jackson decides all is better and comes in the house, eats some food, drinks some water and plops his hairy butt down on my kitchen floor to do whatever cats like to do. That's when I see it, a gigantic wound on his stomach. Dylan rushes him to the vet and we wait for the call.
The vet calls us three hours later with this news - Jackson has a wound that will require him to be "put under" where they will stitch up the wound and insert a drain. Wait a minute - drain? Drain what into where? Call me callous but that cat was staying at the vet's office until the drain was out (I can barely handle barkdust on my floor, can you imagine a cat "draining"?). Once we conquered that challenge, then they told us how much it'd set us back. Let's just say it was worth about two car payments. Two hours later, vet calls again. While Jackson was under they cleaned his teeth and found a tooth that was completely broken in half, was infected, and causing his gums to swell. Oh, and three cavities. Removing the tooth (and possibly the teeth with cavities) would only tack on an additional $100 or so to our final bill. I said to take out the broken tooth, leave the cavities in.
We took him home on Friday (yes, after the drain was taken out). The past week has been like living in the seventh circle of hell. The damn cat has that stupid collar on which traps food pieces like a tray so he's walking around with half a meal falling off his neck most of the time, he's been stressed so he's shedding which makes the whole family miserable with allergies, he got another round of worms while on his outside summer sojourn but we couldn't get the pills down his throat, he howls all night long because he wants to go outside but can't...all of this was frustrating and exhausting but I didn't hit the wall until this morning's fiasco. I went to escape to coffee with a friend only to come home and find my laundry room destroyed. Jackson's box is kept there. There is no possible excuse as to why what happened, happened - his box is the biggest one they make. He had fresh litter, nothing left behind. But what he did was unforgivable. I'll spare the main details and leave you only with this - nowhere in my "stay-at-home mom" job description did the term "cat-shit chiseling" come into play. But that's what I had to do, off the walls, off the floors, off everything except his box - which he left one small piece of the entire present.
After this morning, Jackson is going back to the vet's to be boarded overnight. Two reasons for this - 1) He was going to go tomorrow morning anyway to have the final stitches removed and to get them to give him the pills we couldn't get him to take, and 2) If I have to spend another night with this animal someone isn't waking up in the house tomorrow morning. I won't toss the cat (I'm not that evil) but I will definitely make my way to the nearest Marriott for a night of boarding myself.
