Remember when I said this picture was taken on the night Pixel went crazy?
She’d been doing surprisingly well along the trip–in the car she meowed for the first hour or so but after that she pretty much just took a nap the whole time. I was worried she would be a hot mess, so I asked the vet in advance for some tranquilizers. She recommended pain killers instead, which should calm Pixel in case we needed it without the nasty side effects that came with some tranqs. I was happy not to use them, and things were looking up after the first night in a hotel room and the second day on the road. But then night two happened.
She meowed and scampered around for hours until, around 3am, we just. couldn’t. take it. any more. We finally grabbed her to administer the pain killers–Richard held her wriggly little body while I tried to maneuver the plungers that held the drugs, which I was supposed to apply to her gums. There were 3 mL of juice in each plunger, but the vet suggested I start out with a half dose to see how she reacted to it. Have you ever tried to apply 1.5 mL of pain killer to a wiggly cat’s gums? If you haven’t had the pleasure, let me save you some time by saying you will end up squirting the whole dose in the general vicinity of her squirmy Goddamn mouth.
I don’t know that it had any affect at all, but it did seem like she’d stopped meowing for a little while. Which was pretty good, until they must have really kicked in and man, she was seeing some crazy shit. She started scooting around under the bed and dragging her collar across the uncarpeted floor. I had no idea what she could be doing, although I assumed she was plotting some sort of dastardly, likely sticky or noxious revenge.
By 4am we had turned into sleepless, bloodshot zombies that would gladly have strangled her to just make the sounds stop, and finally I looked under the bed to make a stab at her brains when I saw…nothing. No kitty. Except there definitely was a kitty under the bed, and I started wondering why the vet would give us a drug that gave my cat the power of invisibility but NOT the power of silence.
With all the lights on, we looked under the bed again and noticed that an area of the box spring was sagging and looking a little sheepish. Then we spied the gaping hole torn in the fabric covering the box spring and all the previous sounds started to make sense to even our bloodthirsty, sleep-deprived brains.
We were eventually able to get her out of there (by gently beating the shifting lump with shoes to herd it back towards the hole), put her in her carrier, in the bathroom, muffled by layers of towels, and shut the door. We got a few hours of sleep and she was fine when we got her back in the car that morning. And fine every other night afterwards.
I’m not sure what the lesson is here, but maybe it’s to be prepared that the solution is sometimes worse than the problem. And friends don’t let their cats do drugs.
Crazyface. With a sneaky foot.
Bonus: adorable naptimes.
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