Monday evening, as I’m tripping around the kitchen after returning from gathering groceries and several buckets of fresh sweet corn from my father’s farm, I notice that the cat has taken to frequently going into the little half bath off the kitchen. As this is his feeding/crapping place, this isn’t entirely unusual, but it’s a bit strange to see him frequent it 4 times in 10 minutes, and while he’s not inside, to see him bent nearly double like some sort of Kama Sutra master, licking his happy bits with wild abandon. I started to have the sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t just out for a good night on the town.

After calling Yolanda in and watching him for a while, we decided that our fears were probably confirmed: He was plugged up again.

See, our fuzzy feline friend has this medical condition that has plagued him ever since he marched himself into our house and sat down 2 years ago. We suspect that if he was a house cat before, this may have been the reason that he became a stray, or he got damaged while outside. Every so often (about once every 8 months or so it seems), he gets crystals forming in his urinary tract and they eventually block it darn near solid, disabling him from peeing at all. In the past this required a trip to the vet to have him catheterized to break out the crystals and then flush him clean. If we didn’t catch it in time, or let it go, he proceeded to pee all over the house and chuck everywhere and generally not be in a good condition. So much joy, so little time. <sigh>

Of course, this happens at 9:30pm, the best time to try to go to the vet with a sick pet. We spent a good 15 minutes ‘hrm’ing and ‘haw’ing about whether or not to call someone and eventually elected to call the Sheffield vet. “Thank you for calling *blah blah*, Mike is unavailable until the 20th, if this is an emergency, please call *blah blah* “Oh, LOVELY. The bloody vet is on vacation! Perfect.

So, we look up and call his secretary at home — hey, this is small town Iowa, right? You can do this sort of shit. I could probably call up our doctor at home and get a consultation over the phone. Ring up the school cook and she’d probably lead you through the recipe for something crappy made out of government meat. it’s that sort of place.

Anywho, we got the secretary on the phone and explained the situation and asked for advice, and she recommended calling the emergency vet, so we did. Got him on the phone, explained, and he said to meet him at his office in Allison. Now, Allison is 30 minutes away, or so, so we had some trucking to do.

Thoroughly ticked that we had to shoulder yet another bill for this mouser, I rushed around the house, gathered duct tape, a box, and my keys and so forth. Grabbed the furball and put him in the box, taped it shut, and got on our way. Not having a regular driving habit to Allison (and unsure of the exact time it took to get there), I decided to take back roads and move it along. We settled into a nice, 80mph whiz through the blackened landscape of rural Iowa, hoping to hell that the deer were off playing 500 or something.

It seems that the wildlife (minus the one possum that we gave a horrific, life-shortening swerve around) were indeed occupied with things other than ritualistic, auto-assisted suicide, as we arrived in Allison sans antlers in the grille and blew down into main street to park and wait for 15 minutes while the vet arrived.

The vet arrives after 10 minutes or so and ushers us into his office. He proceeds to poke and prod our cat a bit, trying to feel for his bladder. After a bit, he asks if he’s ever successfully recovered without a cath and we say no, so he gets his equipment ready. We’re curious and we’re there, so we stick around to help and to watch.

He first shoots him up with a half dose of some anesthetic as he busied himself with getting out tools. I petted Leo as he got more and more relaxed. He looked up once or twice and you could just tell that he was going, “Ooooh…. pretty colors….” as his pupils got bigger and bigger. Eventually the cat was face-planting into the surgery table, so we laid him down on his side. The vet came over and squirted some gooey gel into the cat’s eyes so they wouldn’t dry out since they’d be open during most of the surgery.

Then he set up several things and extracted very thin (maybe 1 mm or so) plastic tubing from a package — the catheter. We then flipped the sleepy cat over on his back and as Landa and I held his legs, the vet squeezed his lower section to get his penis to stick out.

All I can say about that is that I am not jealous of my cat. He’s hung like a grain of rice. Really — it’s about that big.

Have you ever tried to find a hole in the middle of a grain of rice?

That’s exactly what the vet had to do — removed his glasses and squinted in the glare of the huge operating light to try to thread the catheter into the cat’s dick, during which Leo, though sedated, was still growling and so forth, so you know it couldn’t have been a very pleasant sensation. I have a feeling that if he tried it while he was awake, we’d all be stripped down to the bones in about a second and he’d be in orbit around Mars.

Eventually he got it started and was stopped several times by crystals that he had to push through — probably 4 times or so. Eventually he got it threaded all the way in, and then it started to weep out a blood and urine mixture. He shot in some saline in after and let that drip out, just to wash out the area.

Then he proceeded to pull a stitching needle (those funky curved ones) and suture thread from the cleaning bowl — I was a bit confused, but then he went and used it to sew the cath to Leo’s skin, essentially. The cath has little wings on either side with holes so he could thread the stitches through and sew it down.

After that, he hooked up an IV and stabbed Leo in the back with it and proceeded to load, subcutaneously, saline into his skin until it expanded out like a big water balloon inside the cat’s back. This was to force tons of fluid into the cat such that his kidneys would have to flush him out violently.

He packed up his stuff and said that he’d keep him overnight at least, maybe for a few days, to make sure that he was opened up properly and flushed and so forth. We talked about antibiotics and so forth and then left.

As of today (Wed), he’s still at the vet’s — the vet thought he’d probably be there through Thursday or so as he wants to observe him and make sure that he’s really cleared out before releasing him.

It’s a bit strange to not have the little furball waiting for me when I wake up or come home from work. It’s a pity he’s such a great cat when he’s here — if he was a shithead and had this problem, I’d probably just have him put down or something, but he’s probably the best housecat I’ve ever met, so I guess we’ll be taking it up the ass for him again. I hope he appreciates it in some sort of manner.