Asscattery; or, If I Have To Deal With This, Then You Have To Read About It

Last Sunday, I stepped out of the shower and nearly collided with Brad. He was standing stock-still in the kitchen doorway, his back to me, staring fixedly at something in the next room. Even from behind, he looked deeply disturbed.

"Um," he said.
"Yes?" I said.
"Well," said Brad, "the cat just sprayed blood out of her butt and onto the living room wall."

Which is to say: can I read my husband's body language, or what?

And also: EWWW OHMYGOD WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE.

The good news, as a quick Google search revealed, is that bloody butt-spray is not the cause for dire concern when it's coming from a cat that it would be if it came out of, say, your grandmother. (Unless your grandmother was a cat, in which case your problems are much worse than mine, and not only that, you can't even read this.) Apparently, Vivian had managed to get herself some sort of a UTI and was trying to signal us, by spraying butt-blood on our wall, that she needed medical assistance.

Well, awesome.

The problem is, this is only a marginal departure from the way that Vivian normally behaves. Yes, that's right: when it comes to the, y'know, process of elimination, our cat prefers to think (hurrr) outside the box. Which is bad enough as it is, what with having to constantly smell my shoes before I put them on just to make sure that they're not full of cat pee, but becomes extra-embarrassing when we take her to yet another vet who just can't believe that we actually live like this.

"So, there's blood in the urine?" said the fresh-faced and perky veterinary assistants, as we sat in the waiting room.
"Yes," I said.
"And has she been displaying any other symptoms? Loss of appetite, crying? Or how about urinating outside the box?"
"Well, yeah," I said, "but she does that all the time."

Fresh-Faced and Perky stared at me.

"All the time?"
"Yes."

More staring.

"Like, ALL the time?"
"Yep."
"Have you tried--"
"Yes."
"But--"
"No, really. Whatever it is, we've tried it."

And it's true, we have. Nothing works. Which means that at this point, we had no choice but to adopt "If you love someone, you must accept them as they are" as a motto applicable to pet ownership as well as human relationships, and to take vague, macabre comfort in the fact that Vivian will eventually stop peeing on everything we own... when she's dead.

And also, to be vigilant about checking ourselves for any evidence of Vivian's bad habit before we go out in public. In some ways, it's even become a bizarre form of marital bonding. Some couples ask each other, "Does my hair look okay?" or "Does this tie go with this shirt?"; we say, "Hey, do I smell like cat pee?"

The appearance of the vet yielded a repeat of the above conversation (the vet, directing his full attention to the cat, clucked disapprovingly and said, "That's not a crowd-pleaser, Viv!"), along with the information that Vivian had not only a pee-related problem, but also fleas and dental disease -- the latter of which isn't all that surprising, because devoted as I am to my pets, I draw the line at brushing the teeth of anyone who's just going to turn around afterward and devote a good fifteen minutes to licking her anus. Like, I'll take the cat's dental hygiene seriously when she does, okay.

Brad, on the other hand, was mortified. As we walked out with our thoroughly-demoralized pet and a plan to scrub our living room wall -- and, if possible, our memories -- with bleach, he worried that Vivan's UTI, unbrushed teeth and flea-bitten hide all added up to the impression that we were terrible, negligent pet owners.

To which I responded by pointing out that the last people to own Vivian were going to kill her, so no matter how you look at it, we're doing a hell of a lot better than they did.

Although, as I smell my shoes every morning and walk through the living room with my eyes closed, it's not like I can't kind of understand why they wanted to.