On top of the issues I’ve been having with the weakness in my arms and legs, etc, I now look as if I attempted suicide on my wrist. With a cat.
We’re having our new windows installed today, and the installer showed up surprisingly early — 7:30 AM, in fact. So we scrambled to round up the cats (well, Karsten scrambled — I shuffled) and lock them in the cat room. We got all except one, the smallest one. Bopper, the Ninjakitten (see icon). The one who was a feral kitten when we adopted her and who reverts to wildcat behavior when she’s scared. For 20 minutes, Karsten and I chased her back and forth across the house, frightening her into a panic state. Karsten was ready to give up. I was ready to try a different approach.
She was cowering in a corner of the living room, ears down, hissing, when I approached her slowly and made soothing noises. I took my time reassuring her, and she gradually began to relax. After a lot of convincing, I was able to pick her up and carry her all the way across the house with only minimal struggle on her part. Only when we got to the cat room door did she start to freak out, writhing wildly and carving a 5-inch gouge into my left inner wrist and a puncture in my right palm. But by god, I got her into that cat room.
And then I started cussin’ and cryin’ about how bad it hurt. Yowch! I should have taken pictures of it, but it was kind of gross. I’m all bandaged up now, and had to put on an extra-long-sleeved shirt to cover my wrist so my coworkers wouldn’t think I was making a desperate cry for help.
What a week this has been!
Ouch! Eddie turns crazy when he gets outside (which is rare) and/or he smells an unfixed male cat. He once put two very deep puncture wounds and two scrapes in my leg from biting me when he went wild. When I ran away from him crying, he came back in the house and wanted to know what was wrong with me! And he also once put a hole (an actual hole) in my mom’s pinky fingernail. She was not pleased. It took forever for that to heal and grow out.
Cats are fun!
I’ve got a scar on my inner left wrist, from a cat scratch when I was very young (I was riding my bigwheel, and I held my hand out to a strange cat who decided she didn’t like big wheels or toddlers). When I was a teenager, I used to show my friends the scar and imply that it was a failed suicide attempt. They all thought I was the epitome of cool.