About half an hour ago, I came upstairs to discover Kitty (not his real name of course! but since there's only one kitty in my house, Kitty works for him.) laying in his basket coughing.
Side story here: The basket is a new obsession for him. When I came home from the hospital with BB, laundry got behind. Then DH took over the laundry duties, and all of the dirty laundry became clean laundry lying around our bedroom in baskets. One particular basket had a few blankets in it, and Kitty would sneak into our room (he was no longer allowed in our room because I was worried he might try to hurt BB, who was now rooming with us) and sleep in the basket. After being chased out of our room numerous times, he eventually gave up his love affair with the basket. Until recently, that is. Yes, the basket of blankets still exists... because they need to be re-washed, and they're not really top-priority right now. I've become a bit more lax about letting him in our room again. He isn't allowed in there alone with BB while BB is sleeping, but he is allowed to hang out some, and has fallen in love with the basket again. The other night when we were putting BB to bed, we moved Kitty, basket and all, into the hallway and the basket of blankets has been there ever since.
So back to my original story... he's lying in his basket coughing. I stop to give him a pet (he has long hair, so it's not unusual for him to have a furball) and discover he has what appears to be a mouthful of blood and it's running out of the side of his mouth. Eek. I called DH at work with the "what do I do?!" panic. By then Kitty had stopped coughing and came out of the basket. A few minutes later he was on the floor coughing again, practically laying down as if he couldn't stand. Long story short, we have an appointment at the vet for 4pm. Which means DH has to come home from work early, skip out on buying our groceries for the week, and drive all the way to Islandview with a cat who screams and pees every time he's in the car. You might be thinking, "Well, yeah, that's what you do for your animals." And I agree. But he's not really DH's cat. He's my cat. I've had him longer than I've had DH! DH doesn't even remotely like him. Not even remotely. But I can't deal with how he attacks the vet and the vet's assistant, etc... I am usually on the verge of tears the entire time I'm there because I hate to see him so miserable.
I've tried inspecting him and can't tell if he was coughing the blood or if he's lost another tooth. (He's probably close to 12 years old and has lost a few teeth before.) So I had to settle for just giving him a nice brushing to try to make him look as pretty as possible for the vet... and to try to get some of the blood off his little chin.
Hopefully it's nothing major, but I don't think DH will be too impressed with me if the cat isn't really sick. He hasn't coughed now for at least half an hour... if I hadn't come upstairs when I did, I wouldn't know that anything was wrong.
So, the story on how Kitty came into my life: (might as well start with him since he's on my mind!)
February 1999, my boyfriend (remember, this is pre-DH) and I decided we were going to get a cat. I was done college and working at my first full-time job, and he was still in school. We were living in SJ, and the Animal Rescue League was too far away for us to visit, since we didn't have wheels. However, at the time Pets Unlimited didn't seem to be the evil puppy-mill selling store that it is these days, and they had cats from ARL for adoption. So we went in, and they had two kitties, both grey and white with long hair. One was a female, about six or seven, and the other was a male, about a year and a half old. We opted for the male (I forget our reasons now, probably had something to do with age though). We were told that he would give "love bites" sometimes, but it wasn't anything major. Turned out that "love bites" are actually full-on leg attacks around 10:00 each night, and hand bites after he has been petted for approximately 45 seconds. But that was okay. Our first hurdle was the apartment people. They needed extra damage deposit money in order to allow us to have him and a letter from the ARL saying we were adopting him. The ARL needed a letter from the apartment indicating we were allowed to have him in the apartment. It was all very frustrating, and I decided to walk away, because Red Tape really ticks me off (especially when you're trying to do something good!) Luckily, the b/f knew how badly I wanted Kitty, so he took care of all that nonsense (I know, there's a reason for it all, but they made it pretty hard to help out a poor little Kitty!) and he came home with us on February 15, 1999, as my Valentine's Day gift.
When my b/f and I broke up, I kept custody of Kitty, and he and I moved back to Freddy at the end of May 1999. He's lived in a few apartments and a couple houses with me since. He even temporarily moved back to SJ with me at one point.
Kitty and I will be celebrating our 10th anniversary together in February. And hopefully everything will be okay when he sees the vet today.
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