Sugar C’mon, Show Your Soul

So, my cat.

Remember how I told you guys a few weeks ago that she had blood in her urine and was going to the bathroom in odd places? Yeah. We took her to the vet and she did indeed have a urinary tract infection. All they told us was that it was a UTI and that we should give her the antibiotics they’d prescribed.

There’s a really long story here about how she didn’t get enough medicine and the vet screwed up and then yelled at us and blah whatever I’m sick of talking about it, but the point is that the UTI either didn’t go away or came back, and so last week I got two more courses of antibiotics for her.

Sasha is so totally not down with medicine time. In fact, she’s on to us now, and if she sees me with the dropper in my hand, she takes off running and hides for a while in the hopes that I’ll forget she exists. On the rare occasions when I am able to catch her, I pretty much have to flatten her against the counter or couch with both arms and one leg, and someone else has to do the dropper while she sheds half her fur all over me and flails around like I’m chopping off one of her limbs. Notably, she does not scratch or bite me during these episodes, though, so that’s good. I think she’d probably bite anyone else who wrestled her down like that.

Sasha doesn’t mind the way the antibiotic tastes. Actually, I suspect she kind of likes it. She just doesn’t want to have a dropper shoved in her mouth because it wasn’t her idea, and I can certainly understand that. So I started trying to think of another way to get the medicine in her, because I definitely do not want her peeing blood all over my townhouse when we move next week.

And this is how the cat started getting her very own dish of vanilla ice cream twice a day. It’s only about a half a teaspoon of ice cream, but still.

Yes, I know cats aren’t supposed to have dairy. Close that comment box right now.

The first time we did it, she was understandably suspicious, and it took a couple of hours for us to get her to eat it. But then she ate it all without a fight.

We don’t often eat at the kitchen table at my house, and when she was a kitten, Sasha gained some notoriety for diving head-first into dishes of food we were in the process of consuming. The funniest incident was when she was about eight weeks old and ambushed me, climbing up the couch and down my arm before diving directly into the bowl of clam chowder I was eating. That’s probably the first time I’ve plucked a kitten out of a bowl of soup.

Somehow during her life we got into a compromise, and now we usually let her lick a plate or a bowl after we’re all done with it. The problem is that she’s become conditioned to wait until the silverware is put down, and she normally won’t go anywhere near people food until she hears it.

So to get her to eat the doped-up dish of ice cream, we have to pretend like we’re eating it first. We clink the spoon around in the dish for a while and then put it down, and about ten minutes later she’ll eat it.

She’s weird. But at least she’s weird getting the proper dose of antibiotics.