Rehabbing Kitty

I figure out soon enough that Trinket can not begin to eat normally with the Cone of Shame on her head.

I also learn that feeding her by hand is an exercise in foolishness.

And I learn that when a cat can't eat she is likely to get cranky and belligerent in record time.

So I take off the Cone of Shame and let her eat like a normal cat who hasn't eaten a needle and thread in the past two days.

And when she's done chowing like a Death Row inmate, I try to put the Cone of Shame back on.

Another exercise in foolishness.

I learn that even a cat with freshly stitched 8-inch abdominal incision can still run like a jack rabbit, jump like a flying squirrel, and scramble like a mouse into all manner of tight places.

By the time I wrestle her into the damn thing she is mad as a hornet and I am sweating like a fat man at a nude beach.

It's going to be a long two weeks. Made especially interesting by the fact that she can't get into the hooded kitty litter box with the Cone of Shame on her head. She is totally pissed, no pun intended, that she has to back in and leave her front paws and head outside the box.  Her expression is priceless. I remove the hood from the box. She's not much happier that her privacy is out the window.

The next day, I get up early to run through what will be the new routine of running interference between two cats and blocking and tackling and wrestling Trinket into the Cone of Shame before I leave. By the time I start the car, I am overheated, shaking, and covered in carpet lint.  And ready for a cocktail. It is 7 am.

Truthfully, I put the cats out of my head at work the next day. I have just about reached my limit of cat intervention. It is nice that people ask about Trinket, but I routinely answer that she is "on the mend." 

I return home and find the Cone of Shame sitting on the basement steps.

I air kiss and call her. She comes slinking in looking all proud of herself.

Like a parent with a toddler who just left his Silly Putty smooshed in the carpet, I point to the Cone of Shame.

Trinket flicks her tail in the air and makes a wide circle around it.

I pick it up.

I can see why she avoided it.

Somehow, in the new complicated kitty litter routine, Trinket had managed to stick the front edge of the Cone of Shame in a buried something-or-other.  A blob of it was now clinging to the edge of the cone, thus making it the Cone of Shadooby.  Shadooby that if she didn't pry the cone from her head would have been an inch and a half from her keen little kitty nose all the live long day. I can only imagine how she wrestled herself out of it.

I pitch the cone into the trash. We'll have to take our chances with the recovery. 

An epic storm is coming and Mama has bigger things to worry about.