So, we got this kitty back in April from the Clatsop County Animal Shelter. I have an all-black kitty, Isis*, and I wanted an all-white kitty to complete the set. A yin-yang thang, ya dig? Anyway, what sold me on the kitty was her zig-zag tail. It literally looks like someone slammed her tail in a doorway; it makes three ninety-degree bends. Kinda looks like a lightning bolt.
This kitty is adorable, but she has been nothing but one huge pain-in-the-ass since we’ve gotten her. See, she has something wrong with her skin, I think. She overgrooms and bites away her fur, to the point where she has these huge bald spots all over her body. At it’s worst, she chewed away to patches between her shoulder blades that reminded of us o “angel wings”. Then those spots got infected.
We took her to the vet and he gave us treatment for fleas, some oral antibiotics (which are so fun to try to get down a sharp-clawed kitten’s throat) and shot her with some cortisone. “She’s highly allergic to fleas,” the vet told us. Great. We live in Western Oregon, which is like Maui for fleas. But our other two pets, Isis and Peppy the dog, don’t seem to have so much of a problem. “Thank you, that will be $250, please.”
She got better and all her fur grew back. We doused all the pets with Frontline. We flea-bombed the house. We shampooed all the couches and carpet. We washed all our bedding. It looked like things were going to be OK.
But lately the same problem has been recurring. We took her back to the vet. He gave us some special shampoo and lotion to calm her itching. He treated her for a nasty case of ear mites. “Shampoo her every day,” he told us, “that will be $175, please.”
Have you ever shampooed a cat? Oh, that’s even more fun than the antibiotics. We dutifully applied this lotion that was supposed to calm her coat. All that did was give her the urge to lick it all off, then tear into her skin even more.
Our most recent attempt has been to place a C-collar on her neck. You know those, they’re the conical clear plastic cones they usually place on dogs. We place it on her cone-out so that her little head looks like a satellite dish. Sure, she can’t chew herself up, but she can’t eat or drink, either. She also walks around with her head bobbing from the weight, can’t jump up on anything, like the couch, so she claws her way up, and becomes very depressed and listless. When she needs to eat, we reverse the collar so it fits like a plastic cape. Now she can eat and drink, but she can barely walk, because her little paws keep sliding up into the collar. When that happens, she freaks out and starts bounding around the room, terrified, flying in random directions with no ability to control her landings.
Oh, and I didn’t mention she has this annoying habit of clawing horizontally on the carpet to sharpen her claws, rather than vertically on the various cat-scratching posts we have around, despite the example Isis sets for her. She also likes to pee just about everywhere except the two well-cleaned litterboxes I have established.
What do I do next? I really can’t afford a high-maintenance cat, but she is very playful, friendly, and adorable. I also don’t take pet ownership lightly; I can’t just get rid of her.
* I didn’t realize it when I named her, but Isis was also the name of the shapeshifting all-black cat in the Original Star Trek episode where the Enterprise goes back in time to the 1960’s and meets agent Gary Seven.
