Joe the Cat has been working on that title for a number of years now, ever since he cost my mother $300 at the vet because he was drinking dirty dishwater back in the 90s. Also factored into that total should be the contents of an entire stand-alone freezer that rotted one long-ago July after he knocked the plug out of the wall by laying on it, but I digress. Needless to say, when we found out the freezer was unplugged it had been a few days, all the meat inside had rotted, and the smell of rotting meat could not be removed from the damn thing so the freezer had to be tossed as well. Thank you, Joe.

While I was on my blog hiatus, Joe managed to rack up another $723 at the vet through the course of two visits, because he ate a piece of plastic. While a genius among cats in a number of respects, he is fucking retarded when it comes to shiny bits of plastic and goes after them on a regular basis. I have known this for as long as I’ve had him, and make a concerted effort to keep them out of his reach, but on this particular day he was faster than me. I’ll start at the beginning.

Rick had gotten a digital photo frame for his mom’s birthday, and I was setting it up. It came with a remote control, and to keep the batteries from being accidentally drained in the box, there was a piece of plastic inserted between the batteries and the remote contacts. You know the type, a card-like thickness, about two inches long and an inch wide, with a red arrow on the end so that idiots know to remove it from the remote. I took it out, stuck it beside me on the couch, and went about uploading photos onto the frame. I took a pee break, and shortly thereafter, Joe started making hacking noises like he was about to launch a hairball. Except no hairball came up, only ropy saliva.

This generally means he’s eaten something he shouldn’t have, so I pried his mouth open and looked for it. I couldn’t see anything. “What the hell did you eat?” I asked, but of course he couldn’t tell me. I suspected the plastic tag, but couldn’t remember if I’d thrown it out or not, so I wasn’t sure. He continued to hack for the next few hours, and in the evening, I called my mom to get some advice. Joe had tried to eat a couple of times, but it immediately came back up. She suggested I take him to the vet if he wasn’t better by the next morning.

The next morning, I called the vet, told them I thought the cat had swallowed a piece of plastic, that he wasn’t able to hold food down, and that I was worried. I took him in. The vet pried open his mouth, but didn’t see anything. He took blood, and because he didn’t know if it was a virus or something making Joe hack (since he couldn’t see the plastic, he apparently discounted that), gave Joe some penicillin, vitamin B12, and something else all delivered subcutaneously with some IV food because he was “very dehydrated.”

The next morning, Joe showed an interest in food and was able to get some down, so I thought hey, maybe he does have a virus. Maybe I was wrong about the plastic. And then the hacking started again, so we went back to the vet. He told me he would do x-rays if I wanted, but they probably wouldn’t show plastic, and since Joe was “very old,” I would have to decide how much money I wanted to spend on him because maybe he was dying. I was a wreck by this point, but told him to go ahead and do the x-rays and left Joe there. I felt awful about this, because Joe hates the vet with a passion, but there wasn’t a lot I could do.

Later that afternoon, I got a call from the vet. They had sedated him for the x-rays and the vet had taken another look down his throat while he was relaxed. And found a plastic tab with a red arrow on it. He removed it and did the x-rays anyway just to make sure nothing else was going on, and they came back clean (I had also been worried about tumors, since Joe had one a year ago, but no tumors in sight). Joe was released to me that evening after the vet had given me a lecture about “cat-proofing” my house. I kind of resented that, since I know that Joe has a thing for plastic and have never had this problem before, but what the hell.

Joe improved immediately after the plastic was removed (big surprise) and boy was he angry that I wasn’t feeding him as much as he wanted immediately. I could see his point, since he hadn’t eaten in four days at this point, but since he was recovering from anesthetic, I could only give him little bits of food at a time. The rest of the time he bored holes into my head with his angry eyes.

And that’s how Joe got a little bit closer to being the $3,000,000 Cat.

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