Cat Fight

Picture this scene, if you will:

It's Monday morning and I am dragging after another night of very interrupted sleep at the hands of an 8-month-old.  We are having a messy breakfast when I look over and notice that Lorenzo, our tall, skinny cat (as opposed to Fat Linda, our short, fat cat) is in the litter box again.  It seems to me that he has been in there a lot this morning.  A little bell goes off in my head.  Our cats have been on a strict diet of the pricey Iams food ever since Lorenzo got a nasty urinary tract infection four years ago from eating the cheap, crap food we were feeding him.  A few weeks ago, Sam's Club mysteriously stopped carrying the giant bag of Iams, so in a moment of laziness, after much mental debate, I went for the store brand food (first I spent 10 minutes in the aisle reading the ingredients).  The cats loved their new food.  But on Monday morning, the "business" hit the fan.  Lorenzo was in bad shape.

Now, it is no secret that our family is not exactly wealthy so our money is often already accounted for each month without a lot of wiggle room (groceries, gas, buying multiple coffees a week to survive), so vet bills are unexpected and entirely unwelcome.

After breakfast, I set off trying to call the vets in the area to find out who will be cheap but not conduct the exam in the back of a van.  I find one and make an appointment.  I have to find someone to watch the kids because I have a mental image of disaster striking around all the sick animals at the hands of a bouncy preschooler and shrieking baby.  But before we can go, the task of getting Lorenzo into his cat carrier looms.  He violently hates being in a carrier and traveling by car.  He gets so crazy and stressed, we fear that he might actually have a heart attack.  So, in all my animal wisdom (that I've made up in my head), I get the carrier out early in the morning so he can get used to seeing it.  I can tell he is already casting me a suspicious eye.  The hours pass and finally it is time to start loading up the troops.  I put Marina in her car seat and make sure Eli has his shoes on.  Just as I start easing my way toward Lorenzo, suddenly a flying red bag flies at him.  Eli has picked up the cat carrier bag and chucked it at the poor cat.  This is not exactly the calm beginning I had hoped for.  I have to ask Eli to please be quiet and sit down while I try to help Lorenzo.  Eli tells me he can help too and gallops away.  I grab the already resisting cat and try to gently ease him into the top zip of the carrier.  Just then, Marina starts to cry about being in her seat.  Lorenzo is meowing and spreading his back legs out in a way that makes my job impossible.  And suddenly, Eli appears out of no where with his lasso rope (a coral colored chain I stupidly crocheted for him one day) and starts running in circles around me and whipping us with his rope.  I try to calmly ask him to stop but he knows that while I am in the middle of my struggle, I cannot do anything to him, so the party continues for him.  I start to sweat.  I have to literally sit on the cat and try to zip the bag but his head kept popping up, all while shielding myself from lasso blows.  Over ten minutes pass in this way:  screams coming from the kids and the cat and crazy Mommy trying to keep her cool and not yell at everyone.  After the bag finally zips, I stand up, take the lasso away from a protesting cowboy and load up the car.  I am so full of cat hair, I look like I'm wearing a sheep's wool shirt.  There is no sense in changing since I know that it will only get worse at the vet.

The office visit is not as bad as I anticipated but I get the feeling that everyone is disapproving of the fact that we don't bring our animals in for annual check ups and I am guilty of feeding them cheap food.  It turns out that Lorenzo has to stay so they can get a urine sample, but the stubborn cat holds out so long that he eventually has to stay the night there.  Eli is very concerned when Lorenzo does not come home from the vet.  He asks me all day if he is dead and living with Jesus now (Grandpa's cat died a few weeks ago, so the conversation has come up more than once).  Fortunately, Lorenzo lives and is home again now.  But twice a day, I have to force a liquid medicine down his throat and his special food is twice as expensive as before, not to mention more than a few bucks incurred in vet bills.

I have learned my lesson.  No more being lazy and cheap because it always seems to catch up to me and will eventually result in a death match with a cat while being beaten with a lasso and deafened by shrill screams from the audience.