the following post is hereby dedicated to suedonym and kalli ko. you know why.

preface: in case you need a refresher course on how i feel about cats and how dog people like us found ourselves feeding someone else’s cats, go here.

so remember this guy (the one on the left)?

last week i found myself in a place more foreign to me than um, say, bangladesh. or perhaps even the moon.

it was the cold stark office of a local veterinarian.

and just by walking through the door i had committed to fork over at least fifty bucks of my hard-earned money.

mowgli, occasionally a.k.a. midnight

and all for a darned cat.

the initial news wasn’t good. in addition to a nasty abscessed laceration on his hind end (not his first serious battle wound), mowgli was suspected of having all sorts of diseases not uncommon in feral cats.

the vet, who clearly had decided i was not a responsible pet owner because my cat, although technically not my cat, is a bit…um, promiscuous, wanted us to cough up the equivalent of my weekly grocery budget to test mowgli for all sorts of unmentionable fatal diseases. untreatable fatal diseases. reasons being, to make sure we didn’t spread said unmentionable fatal diseases to other cats and to, if we chose, put down the cat (this is not the same as putting down the cookie).

my voice cracked as i frantically wiped tears from my eyes (i’m allergic, remember?!) and, after speaking with my husband, i agreed to finance the blood test in addition to the required treatment for mowgli’s laceration.

the veterinarian took a gaunt and silent mowgli–once reknowned for both his solid girth and his magnificent purring–in the back room so a technician could treat his wound and run the lab work.

my allergies kept bothering me for quite some time, while my husband–still at school–did the math on the fees we were being charged and pondered trading in his master’s degree in education for a license to practice veterinarian phlebotomy.

when the technician brought mowgli back in, i decided immediately i liked her because she affectionately petted mowgli during the whole time she explained the procedure (she had shaved his back end and the top third of his tail, drained the abscess, inserted a temporary drain in it and then given him a shot of antibiotics).

ka-ching!

as soon as the technician left, mowgli, standing there alone on the icy metal table, looked back at his bare behind and balding tail, jumped down off the table and hid under the chair.

he was clearly embarrassed.

now i ask you, cat-haters of the world: is that not the cutest thing ever?

the vet returned to the tiny room, suddenly much friendlier and happy to report that mowgli did not, at least, have those terrible unmentionable fatal diseases, and ask us how soon we could take out a second mortgage on our home and sign up for a series of vaccinations for said unmentionable fatal diseases and a host of other fun things that i’m sure included both the bird and swine flues, and probably anthrax and ted nugent, too.

we promptly took mowgli home and installed him in zack’s room–indoors (we are all allergic, remember?). i washed the cat bed that has been out on the back porch–where cats belong–and the designated cat-in-the-hat blanket that lines it and installed them in what is now known as the recovery room.

and mowgli promptly curled up on zack’s bed, where he has been ever since.

i caught myself hand feeding him the other day.

last night as we were rubbing noses he got out of the bed and crawled into my lap (i’m all allergic, remember?).

and i let him.

i need to schedule a follow-up with the vet tomorrow. i think he’d better take my temperature this time, because i’m pretty sure there is something wrong with me.