stupid cat
Bebe has literally bitten the hand that feeds her. Last night she was perched on my hip in bed, and I needed to turn over to drain the snot from one nostril to another. (What?) So I tipped her gently from her perch and onto the soft blankets. This enraged her. She brooded darkly upon her sense of wrong, then darted in and savaged the soft underbelly of my left arm.
So far, so perfectly normal domestic scene in this house of the cantankerous cat. This morning, though, there was a hard red coin-shape around one of the toothmarks. I traced its outline at 9am, and a much larger outline – a biscuit-shape, perhaps – again at 3pm, which is when I left work to go to the ER.
I shouldn’t say this in a public forum, but St Luke’s, the local hospital where Julia was born, offers what is by US standards superb emergency care. Today I arrived at 4pm, where the admitting nurses were very sympathetic and called me “sweetheart”. My sexy boy doctor was seeing me by 4.40pm.
“You’ve done this before,” he said when he saw my outlines around the infection.
“Last time I got a cat bite I spent three nights in hospital,” I confessed.
“What, do you torture them?”
“No, but I’m going to start.”
I have ten days’ worth of broad-spectrum antibiotic horse pills, but that’s the least of it; they gave me a shot in the backside as well. As the needle was going in, the nurse said (sympathetically): “A lot of people find that this hurts. There’s no lidocaine in it.”
I gasped and though more-than-several tears came to my eyes, I bravely did not cry. I am limping, though. You would be too if you’d been skewered with caustic chemicals right next to your sciatic nerve.
Of course I get no sympathy from anyone, because all my friends are afraid of Bebe and think I should probably have her killed. I have to admit, this episode does show her to be a very, very stupid cat.
