Care for a Sample?

I talk to my sister LM often, and when I do, I always seem to have what she calls “the story of the day.” She’s right about that; almost every day, some little thing happens that makes for good sharing with her but not really enough of an event to write in a blog post. She has been encouraging me to write more, but also to embrace the whole less is more thing. In other words, don’t wait until I have something momentous to share, just write.  Who knows, maybe I will post more often. Maybe I won’t. Maybe you will like it. Maybe I will too.

Today’s story of the day involves the dumber of my two cats, Moshe. Today, I called to schedule his annual exam because Moshe is a bit overdue in the rabies vaccine department. I am never too eager to take him to the vet. While I love my vet, Moshe hates him and puts up a fight that he saves especially for the annual exam. The rest of the year Moshe spends lounging and sleeping and overeating and purring loudly and even allowing us to carry his fifteen pounds around like a rag doll with never even an ounce of aggression. When he has to go to the vet, he turns into a vicious cat beast, hell bent on mayhem and destruction and physical harm, all so he can return to the overeating and sleeping part at home. We both hate the annual exam.

I spoke with the receptionist to schedule the visit. After we went through the calendar and found an agreeable date and time, she asked me to try to bring in a stool sample when we came for the appointment. For the cat, obviously. She said it wasn’t a big deal, but if he used a litter box, it would be easier to harvest one than if he goes outside to do his bizness. She actually used the word “harvest.”

Me: A stool sample? That’s a new one.
Her: You’ve never brought in a stool sample? We like to check for parasites.
Me:  No, I’ve never been asked to. He is an indoor cat, though, so wouldn’t his chances of having parasites be kind of small?
Her: You never know. It’s just easier to have a sample for cats by bringing it in. Dogs don’t mind so much if we obtain a sample during the exam.
Me: I can’t really blame him for that.

We shared a laugh, politely.

Me: Well, the problem is he shares the litter box with our other cat, so I don’t really know if I could be 100% sure it’s his.

This is not entirely true. He, like many boy cats, or boys in general, produces a stink unlike any other. He also likes to leave it unburied, so the smell can really permeate our air supply. 

Her: Oh, that would be fine even if it isn’t his. Chances would be good that if one of them has a parasite, they both would.
Me: Good to know. So here’s another question. I am new to the whole stool sample thing. How, um, fresh does it need to be?

I had an image of myself skulking around the entrance of one of our litter boxes, waiting with a Ziploc sandwich bag at the ready.

Her: Oh, it doesn’t need to be that fresh. It can even have litter stuck to it. You just don’t want it to be hard and dry.
Me: No, I suppose I don’t. Okay, well, I’ll do my best. We’ll see you next week with a small bag of crap.

I told my sister this story of my cat’s appointment and the stool sample discussion.  We went on to discuss further how ironic it is that cats love to show you their anuses, but you can forget about actually touching it in the name of veterinary medicine. I pointed out that they are kind of like strippers in that way. You can look all you want, but if you touch, you are going to need traction.

So that’s how the story of the day works. Because, when you think about it, isn’t every day full of shitty little stories?

Take No Crap

My husband and I have been having a heated debate about the merits of getting a dog. We are not fast decision makers, so the debate has been both active and spirited for months now, and we seem no closer to a resolution. On one side is my husband. Let’s call that the pro-puppy side. He loathes the cats and hamster that currently reside with us and feels the time has come for a real pet, the kind that hops in the car with you, eager to join you no matter the destination. He has visions of a dog with a bandana around its neck, running along the hiking trail ahead of him or perhaps chasing a ball into the breaking waves of the Atlantic Ocean.

I am on the other side. I don’t want to call it the anti-puppy side, because seriously, who is anti-puppy? I am more against the part where I am the one who will have to do the majority of the bad stuff that goes along with having a puppy. After all, I am not the one working outside of the home. I do most of the domestic responsibilities, and I try not to complain too much about it, certainly not any more than any other person would complain about his or her job. I just know that I don’t want to take on the brunt of the puppy maintenance.

When I look at a puppy, I look beyond the seemingly smiling face and floppy tails and too big paws, to what a puppy really is, a fur shedding energetic vehicle of destruction. Puppies don’t know how to shit and piss in the yard or while walking because they haven’t been trained yet, and someone is going to have to do the training, now, aren’t they? Even then, puppies, like young children, are going to have accidents, most likely on the Turkish rug. Who’s going to clean that up? Yep, the one who doesn’t work outside the home.

You know how babies put everything in their mouths? Puppies do it too, but they are even worse than babies because they are much more mobile. “The dog ate my homework” exists as an excuse because dogs actually eat homework. Some dogs even eat the home. I have a friend whose dog ate the couch when they went out for the day. A couch. Who eats a couch? After a couch is eaten, it will need to be digested and passed as fecal matter, most likely on the Turkish rug. Do you see the pattern here?

Then there are the vet appointments. The person who doesn’t work outside the home will have to schedule these visits and then take the puppy. What if the puppy gets car sick? What if the puppy who goes on to eat the couch has worms? Do you know what happens when a dog is dewormed? Those worms have to go somewhere, and generally it is two exits, not waiting. This will either happen in the car on the way home, or more likely, on the Turkish rug.

Or just maybe, the puppy won’t be able to go at all. Another one of my friends is the grandmother to an adorable yellow lab. Her daughter, who is off at college and thus is the best candidate to make a ten to twelve year commitment to another life, got the puppy. She picked it out because it was adorable, in the face. She neglected somehow to check it out from all angles, having fallen in love at first sight. She brought the pup home, and immediately it began getting sick all over the house.

My friend took her daughter and grand puppy to the vet’s office, where they discovered the terrible truth about their perfect little puppy. Upon examination, the vet discovered that the puppy didn’t have an asshole. Without being able to take a proper crap, the dog was getting sicker and sicker. I don’t know all the details about how this particular issue was resolved, but my understanding is that an anal orifice was somehow MacGyvered and the dog is now able to have a proper bowel movement. However, because of the tenuous nature of the aperture, a human must wipe the dog after every dump to ensure infection doesn’t develop. The puppy is growing normally and has a lot of love to give. It just can’t take care of its own asshole.

I relayed this story to my husband as part of my debate. He countered with my obsession with animal assholes. He’s right; I have a thing about dog buttholes. I don’t like to look at them. I prefer a breed with a low hanging tail, or at the least, a fur color similar to that of the asshole. Some dogs, like German Shepherds, have an upright tail and underneath, a sort of tan fur patch with a dark asshole in the center, a third eye if you will. I don’t want to look at that all the time. According to my husband, the first thing I would inspect on a new puppy is the butthole, making sure it met my strict pet asshole specifications, which means that I would never select an asshole-less puppy. I have to agree, he has a point about that.

Let’s go back to a moment to the two cats and the hamster. The hamster lives in a cage, where it also shits. I don’t have to go looking for a smell or clean a stain on the carpet. It chews, but I can throw a little twig in the bottom of the cage, so my shoes and furniture are safe. I can hold it, and when I am through, I can put it back in the cage with the shit and the sticks. The two cats were both kittens when we got them. Have you ever trained a kitten to use a litter box? It’s pretty easy. You put the kitten in the litter box. It hops out. You put it back in. It digs around a little, then it might pee or poop, and, if you are lucky, it will bury it under more litter. Repeat that a few times, like two or three, and presto, the kitten is litter trained.

 I just don’t believe that puppies are going to be that easy. Not only do you have to train them to poop when taking a walk, you have to train them to walk. And until that happens, if it ever does, there is going to be a whole lot of piss and shit in the house, probably on the Turkish rug. Ain’t nobody got time for that, especially not the two who go to school or the one who goes to work in an office.

It’s not that I am anti-puppy.  I love puppies. It’s that I am anti-shit. I don’t want to pick it up, still warm, with my plastic bag covered hand. I don’t want to scour the yard for smelly landmines before my friend’s kids play back there. And I sure don’t want to spend the next year or so scrubbing stains out of the carpet (or the Turkish rug.) I have a feeling I will be spending more time doing that than I will romping on the beach or hiking on a mountain with man’s best friend. For now, I am perfectly content with the animals I already have. I am used to their style of waste management. I can tolerate it. I rarely have to inspect assholes or wipe them, and even more rarely do I find the occasional misplaced turd, which is downright tiny compared to the massive human sized dumps of the larger dog breeds.

So for now, the debate goes on, unresolved, until I get some sort of reassurance or, better yet, a written contract expressing the rest of the family members’ commitment to feces removal and general puppy maintenance. I do enough of the crap around here. I really don’t any more actual crap. Especially not on my Turkish rug.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Once a year, I do the unthinkable. I take my cats to the vet.  It’s worse than it sounds.  I don’t have two carriers, so I don’t take them at the same time. Honestly, I don’t think any of us could handle it. They hardly like each other, they can’t stand the car, and they flat out hate the vet. I, on the other hand, adore my vet. He really tries to do his job, as much as the cats fight him, and there is nothing you can’t talk about with him.  And I do mean nothing.

I took Yoko first. She is the alpha cat, and the old lady of the house. At nine years old, she is so waifishly thin that she has surpassed maintaining her girlish figure and gone straight to frail. Yoko hates to get in the cat carrier, so I let her ride in my lap on the way there. I am sure we make for an interesting sight, just a woman tootling down the street in her Volvo SUV with a very angry and thin long haired black cat in her lap. Ain’t nothing dangerous about that at all.

She did fine until the vet walked in the exam room, which is when she turned into the cat from “Pet Cemetery,” all scary hunched and flat ears, fangs exposed and loud hissing. The good news is her teeth were exceptionally clean. She also gained a half a pound. He attempted to finish the exam with Yoko under a towel, but she managed to turn her head three hundred and sixty degrees before biting him. Good thing he had on oven mitts. The bad news is that when she lashed out, she got me right between the thumb and pointer finger. I was the only casualty.

After I got her home, it was time to take the other one. Moshe is younger and much more timid than Yoko. He is twice her size, a good fifteen pounds to her eight. He is also sweet and gentle, but dumb as a sack of hammers. He is the only living creature that I love despite his extreme stupidity. In fact, I love that he is an idiot. On him, it’s endearing, those big vacant eyes just staring at nothing.

Moshe was also scared of the car ride, but not because he remembered where we were going, more because he doesn’t understand what a car is. We got checked in and went back to the exam room. After Yoko’s exam, where I was the only one who got scratched, I decided to leave him in the carrier until the vet entered the room. Moshe stared at me from his carrier, meowing loudly. I, unfortunately, don’t understand meows, although I did get the tone of what he was saying.

The vet came in and checked his cat vitals, weighing him and combing through his fur and looking at his anus and whatnot. He asked me if I had any concerns, and I did. I told him that Moshe has taken to licking his genitals very frequently. I was worried he might be developing cystitis, although the litter box seemed pretty normal as did his eating and drinking.

Cystitis is not unusual in male indoor cats. When I was a kid, we had a cat that developed such severe cystitis that he required surgery. My childhood memory of the event involved the vet doing some major surgery, turning his penis into a cat vagina, or maybe just removing his penis and leaving him totally without male genitalia. I remember it with humor, because when we first got him, we thought he was a girl kitten until he/she had to get fixed, which was when we found out about the whole penis thing. And then, a few years later, no more penis.  I had a transgender cat before transgender cats were a thing.

Are transgender cats a thing?

Also, that operation had to cost a pretty penny. Looking back, I cannot believe my mother would spend any money on the care of a cat. Hell, we went through cats like they were paper plates. And she was tight with money unless she was spending it on herself, so there is no way she coughed up that kind of money to fix a very expendable cat. I have a theory. I think she slept with the vet for surgical favors.

But I digress. I told the vet I was worried about the cat’s constant junk licking. He got the veterinary technician to hold Moshe still, and then got down to table level to try to examine my cat’s penis. Moshe was appalled. He tried to resist this violation of his privacy, but he was no match for the woman holding him still and the veterinarian exposing him. All the while, the vet tried to speak calmly to him. “I know, Mosh, it’s your penis. No one should be licking your penis but you. I get it.”

I was speechless.

After he finished his exam, the vet stood up and said, “We are going to have an uncomfortable conversation now.”

“I thought we already were having one,” I said.

He ignored that and continued. “You might not know this, but some animals masturbate.”

I did know this. My mother in law’s dog used to rub one out with an old Mukluk slipper every chance she got. That damn poodle would slipper scoot across the room for hours. It was the only time she seemed happy. I can’t say I blame her.

He went on. “If a cat licks his penis frequently, we first have to make sure he doesn’t have an infection. You said the litter is normal, and upon examination, his penis looks normal too.”

He stopped talking for a moment and took out a pen and a piece of paper. He began drawing a cat penis for me.

“So a healthy cat penis would look like this, kind of like, well, it comes to a point, you see, sort of pointy. Like a cone, an ice cream cone.”

“No wonder he licks it all the time,” I said. No, I didn’t. I said it in my head.

“If you get really close to it, you will see it has these barbs. That’s perfectly normal for a cat penis.”

“I am not planning on looking closely enough to see barbs. I don’t want to look at it at all,” I said.

“So if it were inflamed or irritated, it would be rounder on the top, like a mushroom.” He drew another cat penis, this time with an inflamed tip. I wanted to knock the pen out of his hand.  “It doesn’t look inflamed though, so that’s a good sign. Which means, well, that he licks his penis because he likes to lick it. If you look on Google for, wait, let me say it differently.”

I laughed, out loud. I actually LOL’ed.

“Don’t go to Google. If you look at the Cornell website, you will see information about animal masturbation. It’s normal for some animals. Just make sure he doesn’t overdo it or it will become irritated. If it gets all swollen, or you know, bulbous on the end. Short of that, though, well, I guess he can have at it.”

Moshe and I were both embarrassed by that visit to the vet, and if you count Yoko too, we all were traumatized. It’s a good thing we only have to go once a year.