Our cat is sick.
And I am not a cat person.
I grew up on a farm where the average life expectancy of a cat was about three years. Causes of death among farm cats include the milk truck, a tractor, a car, a dog, a trap, hypothermia, a horse, a cow, another cat — and of course, disease.
Sad but true — life on the farm can be brutal.
But ours is not a farm cat. Ours is a house cat.
He’s old and now he has kitty asthma. My husband gives him little daily kitty steroids. This involves an adult man wrestling with the tiny jaw of an adult cat. The man pries the jaw open, pushes in the kitty pill and the cat barfs it up.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
We’ve been told the cat can receive these particular kitty meds for a limited time before they begin to affect his kitty organs.
To prevent kitty organ damage, the kitty meds are also available in an inhalable form.
Yes. We are now talking about kitty inhalers.
Administering the medication in this fashion, they say, involves placing an empty toilet paper roll over the kitty’s nose while the kitty calmly and deeply inhales the medicine.
Uh-huh. (This is the cat who has twice been returned ungroomed by professional cat groomers. One time they charged half price for half a hair cut. (Such a deal!)
I see a shredded toilet paper roll, bloody arms and an asthmatic cat in my crystal ball.
My husband has been on Amazon.com researching the best kind of kitty inhalers.
I’ve been considering the best spot in the back yard for a burial plot. “Here lies Fluffy. RIP.” Maybe I’ll plant some catnip over him.
Meanwhile, our old cat grows older. He mostly sleeps, waking only to complain about something. He sheds. He poops in the basement when he gets a chance. He walks across my keyboard when I’m trying to get work done, and after consuming the gourmet cat food we bought, refuses to eat it again after we’ve purchased three more cans.
His asthma makes him sneeze little kitty drool balls on my shirt when I hold him.
We’re going to miss him when he’s gone.
But I guess until then I’ll start buying bandaids and saving toilet paper rolls.
Really. How hard can it be to make an old, sick cat breathe through a tube?