Qui n’a pas de mémoire doit avoir des jambes

~ iamthesunking

Louis Catorze is now on the lowest dose of one steroid pill every other day. And it’s just as well it’s only every other day, because the little sod has now decided he won’t eat his Pill Pockets anymore. So every pill has to be a Greco job.

There have been one or two Drunk-Grecos. The less said about these, the better.

Anyway, health-wise he is doing very well indeed. His skin and fur are much improved.

Cat Daddy: “Yeah, until you get close up. It’s like when you see a girl from afar in a dimly lit club, but then when you approach …” [Rest of comment is too offensive to repeat.]

Catorze’s knee, however, isn’t so great. I had started keeping a diary of occasions when his knee caved in, hoping that it would prove useful in the future should the vet need to know, but then I came to realise that there is no pattern whatsoever. And, the last time I updated the diary, Cat Daddy looked over my shoulder and said, “Oh, is that what you’re doing? His knee has gone loads more times than that, but I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know you were recording it.”

And that was the end of my record-keeping.

These days, when Catorze’s knee goes, it’s nowhere near as distressing for him as that first weekend when he collapsed on top of me at 5am, hissing and whining. He is getting used to it, and sometimes he surprises us by how darned fast he is on three legs. On one occasion I took hold of his leg and gently stretched it backwards and after a soft click, it was fine again. But, annoyingly, whatever I did then seems to have been a lucky one-off, for I haven’t succeeded since.

I have been trying to teach him to lie down when his knee goes. And, despite being so dense that light bends around him, he is learning and starting to do it of his own accord. He insists on choosing the least helpful places to lie down, but we’ll get to that next. The main thing is he’s beginning to understand that lying down beats hobbling around, whining and suffering.

Here he is, demonstrating one of his highly unhelpful places:

Yes, he WAS the one who pulled out those stringy bits from the carpet. Who else would it be?

14 thoughts on “Qui n’a pas de mémoire doit avoir des jambes”

  1. One of my cats had a similar problem, and the vet even mentioned surgery – which, she said, is not usually all that successful, (it happens in dogs too) at least in cats. He learned to just pick up the leg and shake it and it apparently popped back in – similar to at what you did stretching it.

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    1. The vet hasn’t mentioned surgery, but a couple of friends have cats who’ve had it and they say it’s super-invasive and takes a lot of recovery time. 6 weeks of cage rest. Can you imagine the screaming? 😩

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  2. That’s not nearly as unhelpful as Cracker who has decided that his favourite place to sprawl out is on one of the stairs. Now, we have two staircases, a beige carpet on both and he is a sort of beige coloured cat. That is bad enough but he chooses random times on random stairs, alternating between front and back staircases randomly. That really IS unhelpful -not to mention downright dangerous both for him and us. By the way Catorze’s coat looks really thick and shiny even if his knee isn’t great. Perhaps it’s all the luxury cat food he’s been getting!

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        1. Haha! I could feature your photo in a future blog post: “Cats who are naughtier than Catorze”? It’s not often we find them … 🤣🤣🤣

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