A while back One-Eye’s last kid, ingeniously nicknamed “Junior,” developed a limp. Such things typically go away on their own, but after about two weeks this one did not and he was basically a tripod making zero use of his right front leg. So I managed to corral him and take him to the vet. That… was an entertaining experience.
First, the trip to the vet involved a very angry cat in a box:
When I finally got to see the vet in the examination room… man, I *really* wish I’d had my camera running on video. Remember, this was a cat who had decided that one-half of its front paws was not worth using. Suddenly, this was SuperCat, jumping all over the room. First he tried to climb the blinds in the window. The windows ran from a foot or so above the floor to well over my head. To keep him from destroying the blinds, the vet and I rolled them up… at which point Junior vertical-leaped from the ledge below straight up to the the rolled-up blinds at the top of the window. Which he grabbed on to with both sets for front claws and dangled. After a bit he dropped down to the floor, jumped up to the examining table, then leaped *over* the vet to grab onto the door jamb over the main entry door, which he hung from for a while. It was… a thing of glory. That cat was the very embodiment of the concept of “oh HELL no.” I hadn’t laughed that hard in I don’t know how long.
The vet asked me to leave the room. Which I did, and stood outside listening to the sitcom sounds of things being knocked over and destroyed. This went on for a while before the vet could put Junior back in the box. At that point the vet came out with him, took him in the back and gave him a shot, a mix of pain killers and antibiotics. Vet decided that the most likely cause of the limp was one of those infected cysts that cats seem to get all the time. Giving Junior his shot was another exercise in amazing feline anger and required some tools I’ve only ever seen used on rabid pit bulls and the like.
The end result was that Junior was *EXTREMELY* unhappy on the ride home:
I debated whether to let him cool off in the box or just let him go; in the end I just released him. He became a small black blur, heavily redshifted, headed for the horizon. The vet assured me that the chances were good that that would be the last time I’d see him, that he’d go find somewhere else to live without the scary giant monsters who tortured him.
A few days later he was back, sans limp. Since then I’ve seen him regularly… but he is not friendly towards me. I don’t think he likes me anymore. Though I do note that he still eats the food I give him.