Well, not to talk trash about Shaft, but this week he’s got nothin’ on my baddest cat, Floyd. 

Sunday I had to take the Floydster to the emergency vet clinic.  He’d had an abscessed tooth removed about a month ago, but his cheek started swelling up like the abscess was back.  The vet went in and discovered that part of the tooth had been left in.  There was a lot of talk about pus.  And the color of said pus.  Ewwwwwww. 

Floyd is old. He’s somewhere between eighteen and twenty, close as we can tell.  He’s lost a lot of weight in the last year (no, not thyroid), now the vet thinks it’s kidney disease.  Despite being underweight, he managed to pull through both operations.  He’s gained almost a pound back since Sunday.  And he has this bitchin’ new piercing. 

It looks like someone jammed a piece of macaroni into his cheek.  Actually, it’s a drain.  Yeah, there’s more pus talk coming.  I was told to compress the cheek.  But no one explained I was supposed to actually squeeze the pus out through the drain.   I tenderly did the warm compress thing on his cheek.  Then I went back to the vet and saw her in action.  “I don’t think the drain is ready to come out,” she said.  “Was I supposed to do that?” I asked.  “Yep.”   Oh hell, I thought, I am The Worst Pet Mom Ever. 

Now, I have been doing the squeeze-the-ooze-out thing.  I abandoned the warm compress for gauze.  It’s easier and I can see what I’m doing.  The drain’s supposed to come out tomorrow, and since I’m getting very little action from the drain, I think we’ll be good to go. 

  Unfortunately, I can’t release him back into the rest of the prison population.  He still has to wear his Elizabethan collar, which makes him look like an Australian Frilled-Neck Lizard.  This, of course, scares the shit out of the other cats.  And he’ll have to keep wearing the collar until his stitches have healed up.  Read More »

I remember watching this one on a military base in a Saturday Matinee. I was quite young and I thought it was so cool. I suspect this is the movie that led to my later early masterpiece where the family of colonists are heading out because they’ve discovered oxygen on Jupiter.