We got the kitten spayed this weekend. The Humane Society could not pronounce “Jennyanydots,” so all her paperwork just said “Jenny” on it and it made me a bit sad. She’s Miss Dots to us when I’m not calling her “floof!” Although I don’t care a whole lot. It just made me feel like it was less homey than I would have liked. We dropped her off in the morning and then picked her up in the evening. Her recovery has been simultaneously hilarious and tragic all at the same time.
“She’s still under the influence,” said the gal who handed us her cat carrier. “So don’t let her drive home. Put the lampshade on right away, and you can remove the black bandage from her leg in an hour.”
“I wish someone had told us that she wasn’t allowed to drive before she got her last DUI,” I said to Brian later in the car. He laughed.
Boy, was the gal at the vet’s office right. Dots could not walk in a straight line to save her life. She kept flicking her foot backwards to get the bandage off, and she HATED the cone. It turns out that a high kitten attempting to get out of a cone is the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen. She decided that if she walked backwards, she could probably walk out of it. So she was staggering around the room backwards, bumping into all sorts of things, rolling her head around and generally being floppy. But she was doing the whole thing with this nonchalant look of boredom on her face, her pupils wide.
She finally gave up and slept on the stairs, only waking up intermittently to kick at the cone with her back feet. The next morning, she kept misjudging distances and space, and ended up falling off the window ledge, the couch, the counter, and the dining room chairs. She has now mostly adjusted, but she is constantly itching her ear and hitting plastic instead, or trying to clean herself by laying the cone against her leg and licking it. She keeps this resigned look on her face as if it was a horrible trial she was just going to have to submit to. It breaks my heart.
I had heard that spaying cats made them much more friendly, but I wasn’t prepared for quite this friendly from Dots. She wants to constantly be on my lap these days, and she’ll even cuddle up to Brian. One of my favorite things about my floof is that she was sometimes such a feisty little shit; just like all women should be. She’s been so docile the last couple of days. I’m hoping it’s just because the cone has quenched her spirit, and when it’s gone in a week she’ll be back to normal again.
“I hope she’s not,” Brian said when I told him. “I like this Dots much better.”
We’ll see… I mean, I could do with a little less mayhem. But I’m loathe to dispense with the mayhem altogether. It keeps life interesting.
Casey E. Hamilton 