One Down, Eight More To Go

It's a good thing cats have nine lives. Maddie decided she wanted to use one of those up over the weekend. This is what your cat ends up looking like when she decides it's time to start flossing her own teeth like her mommy does.

Bright and early Saturday morning around 6 a.m. I got out of bed and went to the living room only to find myself stepping in a pile of cat vomit. Nice. It was cold and gross and squished between my toes. I took two more steps only to discover another pile. It seemed as though Maddie had an upset stomach because over the next hour that followed, she puked about 7-8 times.

I didn't think this was really a cause for alarm just yet. I mean, she's done this before because she likes to eat anything from cellophane, which I believe I have mentioned before that I found in one of her turds, to Easter grass to My Little Pony shoes, etc. Anything smaller than a Webkinz in our home is at risk of encountering Maddie's insatiable desire to eat the unknown.

Throughout the course of Saturday and Sunday she threw up about every hour. By the time I was able to get her to the vet's office, it had been approximately 2.5 days of nonstop throwing up coupled with no food or drink or going to the bathroom. By that time she was extremely lethargic and I have to be honest with ya, I thought she was dying.

The vet proceeded to pry her mouth open and look under her tongue only to find that she had devoured something of a stringed nature that had looped itself underneath her tongue and both ends of the stringed object had protruded down her throat. I later realized it was the dental floss that I had tossed in our bathroom trash can. Her body's reaction was to get rid of it, hence the around-the-clock vomiting action. However, a cat's tongue and esophagus is barbed and is designed to force things down, and because it was under her tongue it was caught and it couldn't go anywhere.

Upon taking x-rays, we also discovered that by throwing up, the dental floss was being pushed back and forth and pulling her intestines into an accordion-style jumbled up mess that was shoved up under the right side of her ribcage, leaving the rest of the space in her body actually bare. She also had several gas pockets that had developed because the intestines were folded so tightly. She had to go in immediately for emergency surgery and ended up not coming home until Wednesday. I did go to visit her on Tuesday evening and was so glad to see her doing better.

You can see the incision was quite large, plus they had to cut two holes in her intestines in order to get all of the dental floss out. And I say "all" of the dental floss because the length of dental floss that was extracted from the intestines itself was 30cm which equals 12 inches. I guess from now on I'll have to make sure I bury my dental floss deep within the trash next time because I refuse to compromise my personal hygiene for the sake of a cat.

Just for fun, I'm posting a picture of Ally. She does this quite frequently and it just cracks me up. She's so fat that she looks like a big furry Christmas tree. She also poses like this on the top bunk bed at 3 a.m. when she has climbed to the top herself causing a terrible ruckus and wondering why we've come in to investigate.