LOLOL...Ha! You Asked!

CEDARFLAME said...
People from the middle of the country scare the crap out of me.

Maybe Bennie was right, if we made Turkey the national bird we would all be eating something else tomorrow.

Okay, I got to ask. How did Turkey save your cat?

21 November, 2007

Well, funny you should ask. Ha! I get to tell another story. And by request this time! :-)

Several years ago my daughter Carrie dropped by our house with her new cat. My cats were NOT happy. Muffy Puffy, our 10 year old cat, was particularly displeased. She hissed, and then ran into my bedroom to hide. Carrie and the cat stayed for a couple of hours and then went home.

Several days passed. Since I'm not an attentive cat mother (and I'm iffy on my human children too), I didn't notice that Muffy Puffy was missing. Finally, we figured out that she was gone and started searching the house for her. We found her under my bed, where she'd been hiding for the three days since Carrie had been there. She hadn't eaten, drank, or pottied in that time. When I dragged her out, the whites of her eyes were a bright golden color, as were her ears, and every other place her skin showed through her fur.

I took her to the vet and she said that Muffy Puffy was jaundiced, and that her liver had failed during the time she hid under the bed with no food or water, and she would probably die. She sent us home with special food and we made an appointment to come back in a week.

She wouldn't eat the special food. In fact, she wouldn't eat any food. Muffy Puffy, who was famously obese, got skinnier and skinnier and more and more lethargic. I kept taking her to the vet and the vet kept changing food, trying to find one she'd eat. Finally, we were force feeding her high-calorie food via a syringe, and hydrating her with IV fluids delivered with a 21 gauge needle that we'd stick in the back of her neck several times a day. For months she got sicker and sicker and we debated daily about putting her down. In the meantime, we'd try to cram a few teaspoons of food into her, and run enough IV fluids into her to keep her alive.

One day, I cooked a turkey. I don't think it was the Thanksgiving turkey...I can't remember... but while it was cooling on the counter and we were doing something else, Muffy Puffy jumped up on the counter and started eating it. This is the cat that hadn't eaten anything for months. She stood there and ate probably a pound of turkey while we watched in amazement.

And that was that. We fed her the rest of the turkey (I wouldn't let anyone else eat it...it belonged to Muffy Puffy now) and in a few weeks she was completely healed.

But she hated us for the force feeding and the IV, and as soon as she was better, she ran away and moved in with the neighbors. I used to see her sitting in their window, glaring as I walked by. Bitch.