A Tail of Woe

This is my cat, Pizza Maria. I just interrupted her 34th nap of the day to take this picture. She was especially pleased with the blinding flash…as you can see.

This is a piece of my cat’s tail. Notice how it’s no longer attached to my cat. This is the fault of both me and my youngest child. Wait! Don’t call PETA or the SPCA yet. Let me explain.

When we first moved into this house, the cat was extremely freaked out by her new surroundings. She spent the first night cowering in the space created by leaning a table against the bar in the basement. The next day, when we moved the table up to the kitchen, she sought solace underneath the built-in benches in the rec room. These benches are totally retro seventies. They’re made of brick, they’re hollow and they have removable wooden seats covered with cushioning and finished off with the finest pleather money could buy in the age of disco. On that second day in our new house, while trying to coax our frightened kitty out of her hiding place (to use the litter box already….because oh my god cat, how long can you hold it?!), Adam lifted one of the heavy wooden, pleather lids and it fell in on itself landing right on the end of Pizza’s tail. A number of events happened from this point:

The cat screamed, Adam screamed, I screamed

The cat bolted up the stairs, trailing blood all over the beige carpet. I was behind her yelling, “not the carpet! Not the carpet! Stay on the tile!” I chased her into Andie’s room, visions of the very large deposit we had to pay for her pet-ed-ness when we signed the lease, swirling down the proverbial toilet.

I learned that paper towel affixed with scotch tape does not stick to a furry animals tail. Neither does the medical tape from the first aid kit in the van. Nor the last resort duct tape found in one of the ten thousand boxes in the garage (sorry Red Green, you were wrong on that one). But luckily! The tail will stop bleeding a mere few hours after you drop a large object on it and have managed to hold the cat down for all that time to sop up the blood. Also, OxyClean IS as wonderous as they tell you on the commercials and the blood comes right out of the many, many places it hit the carpet (phew!). Don’t keep pets and children without it.

So, flash to three and a half months later and the tail was healed as well as it was going to. It was definately broken and crooked at the end, but according to Google there was nothing a vet could do short of amputation, so we didn’t take her in to get checked (we are bigtime believers in saving money via the internet. I performed Richard’s appendectomy thanks to a wiki, we save on cable by just watching YouTube and our cheque from Bill Gates should be here any day now, as we forwarded the 236 emails just as they instructed). She wasn’t fussy about it unless you purposely touched the end of her tail to check it, but sometimes she would rub against one of us and flick her tail at the same time, then yowl and give us a dirty look like it was our fault.

Friday night, I have the food ready, the house is clean and I’m looking out the window waiting for our guests to arrive. I take a step forward and my foot goes under the coffee table where, unbeknownst to me, the cat is sleeping. My foot lands squarely on the end of her tail, she YOWLS at the top of her feline lungs, scratches the motherfark out of my foot and bolts for the bedroom, stopping only once to look back and shoot me a dirty look and some parting words. That’s when I looked down and found that a piece – a rather large, 2 inch piece – of my cat was still in the living room. There’s a piece of bone in there! It’s rather brittle, proving that the end of her tail has been dead for quiet a while. It’s kind of cool though and looks sort of like a rabbits foot (would it be wrong to hang it on a keychain and use it as a goodluck charm when I play Texas Holdem? Wait, we’re still not calling the SPCA right?)

I wanted to take a picture of it next to a ruler to show how big of a piece it really is, but all I could find was a protractor.

Portrait of a tail at 180 degrees

Then I just started taking pictures of it with random stuff:

Like my stapler…

and our bananas and Jack Daniels…

Then I actually found a ruler. See? Two and half inches! My cat is two and a half inches shorter now.

We call her Stumpy McStumperson.

I despise you, Human.

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