pumpkin – the good, the bad, and the ugly

this is our cat, pumpkin. isn’t she pretty? such pretty markings and so fluffy…

what do you think now? pretty huh? like cat hair tumbleweeds. my new motto is – “you may look at the ball of fur, but please don’t twine it into yarn.”

oh and this was a good one. this little number was right under the dining room table. imagine seeing that when you sit down to dinner with company. awesome!

poor pumpkin. she’s such a sweet, loveable cat, but i should have known that she was going to be a handful when we adopted her from our local vet almost ten years ago. this was our first experiencing adopting a kitten (up to that point, any cat i had owned was either from a grocery store parking lot or a stray that my bleeding heart couldn’t turn away). as it turned out, pumpkin was part of a litter that was found dumped behind an abandoned building along with their poor, little emaciated momma.

red flag #1 – pumpkin and her siblings had been weened at a month old and looked worse for the wear. on top of that she had a very sensitive digestive system.

red flag #2 – we couldn’t take her home right away because she had ringworm. oh the vet gave us the option of giving her the ringworm treatments at home, but i thought that might be a task better left to trained professionals.

red flag #3 – after two days at home, pumpkin developed a urinary infection which required large doses of antibiotics. said antibiotics caused her – let’s just say – severe bowel issues which required that i wash her butt every night in order to remove the dried poo from around her butthole.

after a few days of this mortifying process, i called our vet in tears. he graciously offered to stay late so i could bring her in. the only problem was that my spouse was out of town and i had to get the babysitter home. so i loaded up the new suburban with my kid, the sitter, and pumpkin. couldn’t get any takers to hold our beloved kitten (what with her poo crusted butt and all) so i held her on my lap wrapped up in a bath towel. the babysitter’s house was a 10 minute drive and pumpkin cried the whole way. not the tiny “mewing” that kittens do – no it was the pathetic howl of cat being held down against its will. once we got the sitter dropped off the fun didn’t stop there. no – i had to vote! it was the 2000 election day and the polls were closing in 30 minutes. i pulled into the polling place and the line was out the door. great. then came the dilemma of what to do with pumpkin while i went in to vote. do i risk her having an accident in my spouses new suburban? um, no. so there i was in the polling line, strung out working mom with tiny, bath towel wrapped kitten in my arms and child in tow. have you ever tried connecting the arrows on a voting form with an unhappy, digestively distressed cat in one hand? i wouldn’t recommend it. but i managed to pull it off and finally made it to vet’s office. by the time i got there all three of us were crying. i can only imagine what he thought when we pulled in.

needless to say pumpkin made it through her first traumatizing few weeks. she’s still a little off and has some unsightly issues now and then. but we try not to judge her too harshly – she had a rough start.