S.
(6/4/06)
S.,
After Max bit me and went to hide under the bed, he proceeded to growl, hiss, spit, and make some of the ugliest noises I've ever heard come out of a cat.
Later he came out and growled at me in person, hissing and swatting at me, while I was watching television, unprovokedly from several yards away.
He pretty much scared the crap out of me, and considering the damage he did to my finger, I was even more terrified when he leapt upon me in the middle of the night and started growling, hissing, swatting and spitting at me, before racing back under the bed, where he proceeded to growl and make very angry cat noises any time he heard the slightest noise, or seemed to think he'd heard a noise. I pretty much didn't get any sleep at all.
Friday morning, greeted by more growls, noises, and hissing, I decided it was a good time to start carrying around a yard stick, just in case he decided to take another bite out of me.
I left food and water, went to work, forced to wear a vinyl glove on my left hand all day because the bite wound would not stop bleeding. It also felt like I was being stabbed by a thousand needles every time the finger touched or bumped something. I did quite a bit of hair that day, so I went through about a dozen or so bandaids and a couple of gloves, before I noted the red streak tracing up the side of my finger.
A couple of hours later, it had creeped up the back of my hand to my wrist bone, when I decided it was in my best interest to cancel my last appointment and go to the hospital to have my hand looked at by a doctor.
I ended up staying in the hospital for a little over 25 hours, hooked up to an IV, woken and/or bothered every 2-3 hours to have my temperature and blood pressure taken, sharing a room with an insane, surly, screeching old woman, my only entertainment being Saturday afternoon television, which pretty uniformly sucks, and watching the catheter bag attached to the side of her bed drip urine on the floor.
I had to call work and have them cancel or reschedule all of my appointments for Saturday, which is my busiest day -- and I was booked solid the entire day, telling everyone that I was in the hospital being pumped full of antibiotics for a vicious cat bite.
Saturday afternoon, after the line widened and crept up to my elbow in a painful stripe of red, a team of doctors decided that after 3 horrible hospital meals, no sleep courtesy of the old lady snoring like a lumberjack during her frequent bouts of snoozing, and my constant begging and pleading to be allowed to stop being in the hospital, despite them wanting to keep me another day, it was safe for me to go home, as long as I promised to return if any complications should arise.
The concensus of the medical staff was also that I should return Max to you first thing on Monday, which I agreed with wholeheartedly.
I was then given a prescription for 10 days worth of ridiculously strong antibiotics, and eventually released back into the wild.
I don't know if you've seen Pet Sematary, but Max continued to bear a striking resemblance to Church, post-resurrection from the evil Indian burial ground.
My warm welcome home was snarls and growls and whatnot from under the bed.
I checked on the food and water situation, and then went to bed, yard stick at my side, cocooned in a protective layer of pillows, hopefully to make up some of the last couple of days worth of lost sleep.
Bright and early Sunday morning, I got up, yard stick in hand, and went to go use the facilities. As I started to flush, I noticed a large, bristling ball of angry in the hallway, immediately between me and freedom.
I carefully washed my hands, dried them on a towel, and as I turned to face the hallway, Max continued his noisy antics before hurling himself sideways into the closet door, popping it open.
He proceeded to knock over most of the stacked crates of clothing, as well as tear down some of the hanging ones, before jumping back out into the middle of the hallway, ears back, fur bristling even more menacingly, as he slowly advanced towards me, yowling angrily, pausing every couple of nanoseconds to spit and swat at the air between us.
Not quite sure exactly what to do, I decided to snag a pair of pants off of the floor and flip them over him, holding them in place with the stick while I ran the other direction. Which worked, and seemed to make Max even angier.
I guess that he was angrier only because the noises he was making as he shot past me and under the bed were at least twice as horrifying as the ones he made the first night, which until that point had been the scariest cat noises I'd heard.
We're talking trapped and caged wild big cat angry. Times at least 2.
I called my mom for advice, and she suggested getting the cat out of the house then and there, to which I reluctantly agreed.
I put on several layers of clothing and some gloves, and tried poking at Max to get him to flee the bed, but ended up having to climb under the bed after him, because he was out of the reach of my yard stick.
When I finally touched him with one hand, he made a noise that most closely resembled a person screaming bloody murder, at a volume that I am sure suprised the neighbors for several units above, below, and around me.
He then shot out from under the bed and ran into the kitchen, where I thought I had him cornered.
My original intent was to shoo him back into the carrier, but he didn't feel agreeable enough to assist me in that venture, so I followed him slowly into the kitchen.
When he saw me, he shot up straight into the air, landed in the sink, spun around, and launched himself at me, managing to hook one claw about a quarter inch below my lower lip, just a little to the left of center, the tip of when exited my lip just at the lip line, where the flesh starts to turn pink.
I managed to pin him against my torso, facing away from me, with my right arm, as I tried to carefully unhook his claw from my face, which took a couple of minutes. In the meantime, he scratched the hell out of both of my cheeks, clawed me so hard in some places that he left bruises along with scrapes, and sliced up my wrists between sleeves and gloves.
I somehow managed to wrangle him across the room and into the carrier, closing the door, and going into the bathroom to see what damage Max had wrought.
Most of the facial scratches were extremely bloody, but superficial, and I think that only one of the wrist wounds will scar significantly, but the claw through the lip left an oozing slit in my face that isl definitely healing into visible scar, with a small lump of scar tissue on the interior. It's gross and tactile.
When I came out of the bathroom, the carrier was shaking violently, much like the velociraptor crate and the beginning of Jurassic Park, to use another cinematic reference.
I decided that before I would go to the ER again to have my face patched up, I would get Max out of the apartment, and I didn't want to leave him in the car, because what if they wanted me to stay another night?
I initially took him to Anti-Cruelty, but was turned away because they wouldn't take a biter. I was instead referred to Animal Control, somewhere in the 27th block of South Western.
With much regret and many tears, I decided that it was best to take him to Animal Control, and let them deal with him.
After filling out all of the paperwork, and sadly telling him goodbye, I cried for10 minutes, waiting for the man that took him away to return with the carrier.
When he did, he asked me how long I'd had the cat, and when asked why, told me that he'd worked there a long time, and that in his experience, Max was the most vicious cat that he'd ever handled. He said it took TWO grown adult professional men to subdue him enough to get him from carrier to cage. And he said that I was extremely lucky that a few scrapes and a couple of future scars are the only thing I got out of it.
That Sunday, he was put on a ten-day rabies watch, after which he would most likely be humanely euthanised.
Which would have happened during the middle of this last week.
Let me say at this time, that I never in all of this blamed Max for the circumstances. I'm pretty sure that being given away to a stranger and taken to a new environment just snapped whatever final string of sanity in his adorable head that was holding him all together in one piece. Clearly, there was something fundamentally wrong there to start with, and I'm not sure exactly who is to blame for that, whether it was nature or nurture.
I made a very poor value judgement in agreeing to take him, considering that he was much larger of a cat than I really wanted, and that he was so particularly standoffish to me in the first place. I've never met a cat that didn't like me, and I suppose that like you, I just thought that he'd get used to me, and while never a lovey lap cat, he'd at least make a reliable companion.
And you made a very poor value judgement in giving him to me. You had to have some gut instinct that Max wasn't going to do well with a new owner, and you should have followed that instinct.
Never once in this entire experience did I ever witness your description of him as "He's really sweet and playful. And LOVES attention." to be at all accurate. Not even when I was at your apartment in the first place.
At first I didn't contact you to let you know what was going on because I was angry, and there was nothing you could have done to save him.
Max was broken. Maybe not all the way at first, but I think in retrospect, that somewhere between Wicker Park and Edgewater Beach, he snapped.
I didn't tell you at first because I was angry, but then I eventually decided it would be easier not to tell you, because that way you could continue to believe in your heart that he was okay. That he got to my house, settled in splendidly, and after I'm done typing this note to let you know that everything's great, we're going to go play with some wonderful new cat toy I got at Petsmart. Then you could enjoy your move to Seattle, and not worry about past things.
But I also decided that if you asked, I would tell you the truth.
The truth is, at the end of things, he was all wide-eyed and cowed, a circle of white completely surrounding his irises. He was mewling and butting his head against the carrier and I was scratching him on the side of his head, telling him he was a good boy, and that I was sorry it had to be this way. I scritched him under his chin, and I gave him away to a man I don't know, while I blubbered and snuffled like an idiot.
Then I drove to the ER and got patched up again.
The truth is, we're both sad, but I'm the one with the $1k in deductibles and co-pays that my insurance won't cover.
pixie
