It’s autumn, a time of abundance and gratitude, and the biggest gift for which I am thankful right now is Louis Catorze being home.
At least, something faintly resembling him is in my house; I can’t be sure that they’ve given us the right animal because this one is skinny, with shaved arms, a shaved belly and the kind of jet-black eyes that you usually only see in films when someone is bitten by a zombie. It is also eerily silent. Not a squeak has been uttered by this beast since he’s been in our house, despite the vet calling Cat Daddy the day before and saying, “He’s meowing a lot – is this normal?”
(Of course it’s not normal – nothing about Catorze is normal – but it would have been too complicated to explain, so Cat Daddy just said yes.)
Poor Catorze. After two nights at the vet’s I wondered whether, perhaps, he thought his whole time with us had been a dream? And now, perhaps, he thinks that his time there was a dream? He spent much of his first night back pitter-pattering about the place as if exploring it for the first time, going in and out of the cat flap 978 times, all in absolute silence. But he’s also been super-cuddly, spending time on both our laps, clearly happy to be home.
The little sod has also come armed with an arsenal of medication, all unfamiliar to me: Buprenorphine (which the spell-checker didn’t seem to mind, so obviously it’s not uncommon) for pain, and Cerenia (which it didn’t like so much) for nausea. The vet told us to administer them to Catorze “whenever he was in pain or feeling sick”, and neither of us have the slightest idea of how we will know this. When Cat Daddy asked the question, they replied, “Just keep an eye on him” (?).
So here I am, with drugs that I have never seen before, and I’m to decide how often I given them to a cat who fights like a ninja when anyone attempts to drug him. What could possibly go wrong?
Never did we think we’d be missing Catorze’s screaming and desperate to hear it again, yet here we are. Let’s hope he will be back to normal (his normal, obviously, not most normal people’s normal) very soon.
For more Catorzian capers, please visit http://louiscatorze.com
Leave a Reply