One Tuesday morning while I was out on my hour-long walk, poor Thimble used the litterbox and had a less than pleasant time of it afterwards. I shall try to be delicate, but let's just say that a poop got stuck in the fur of his butt and the fur wound around it so tightly he couldn't get it loose.
When I came back I found the poor cat frantically scraping his butt along the floor. The fur was so tightly packed that he wasn't even leaving any residue for me to have to clean up.
Cats cover their excrement in order to keep predators from finding them (and killing them). It's a genetic imperative so intense even extremely ill cats who can barely move will still try to cover it up. If a cat isn't doing this, something is wrong--either the cat is sick or the litter box is. (In other words, the box is in a scary place like right next to the clanking furnace, or it's so stinky the cat figures there's no point, or it hurt to go there last time and the cat, not knowing any better, blames the location rather than his own physical health.)
So for Thimble to have that smell following him had him in an utter panic.
I managed to grab him and a pair of disposable gloves. In that order. I'm not the best in a crisis, I'll admit. I then had to put on the gloves while still keeping hold of Thimble, who is frantic. Then I fished the nearest scissors out of its drawer and removed the offending bit from Thimble.
That makes it sound a lot easier than it was; I had to hold him down on his side so I could see what I was doing. He kept trying to clamp his tail down across the area to muffle the smell, and trying to get away in order to try to fix it himself. None of this was helpful, of course.
And using a scissors on a cat is always fraught with danger. Their skin is very delicate and easily cut, and when they have such thick fur it's hard to tell where the fur ends and the skin begins.
But between the gloves allowing me to handle the "ew, yuck" bits with confidence and Thimble's natural trusting nature, I was able to get him cleaned up.
However, that wasn't the end of it. Thimble will eat anything that doesn't run away from him, including non-food items, so this sort of digestive problem wasn't going to be an isolated incident. And what if it had happened soon after I left for work, and he'd been that frantic and upset for the whole day? Something had to be done.
Much as I knew he'd hate it, I made him an appointment with the same groomer who took care of Colby's stomach trim. The conversation went something like this:
"Remember Colby and the tummy trim only that we did and you let me hold him?"
Answer in the affirmative from the groomer.
"Well, I need to bring Thimble in for just a sanitary trim, not his tummy, but Thimble is not Colby. You're going to need someone else to hold him, not me, someone strong."
Assurances of getting someone with a guy-name to help. (It was a guy, but you never can assume that over the phone.)
I brought Thimble in the carrier, not the kangaroo pouch. And I didn't even go in the room with him, but instead stood outside, right outside, where I was out of sight but I could hear what was going on.
The problem is this. Thimble is quite aware of his duties as my therapy cat. But since he is responsible for helping take care of my emotional well-being, he's also of the opinion I can't really take care of anything properly. Colby looked to me for reassurance during his trim. "Mama, is this an okay thing that is happening to me?" and when I said it was, he calmed down and let it happen.
Thimble would look to me for rescue, and when it was not forthcoming, he would have decided to rescue himself. And he's probably twice as strong as Colby even if he's only half a pound heavier. (I swear, I think Thimble runs laps around the house during the day when I'm gone.) But if I wasn't there to look to for rescue, he might remain in a confused state of not knowing if this was something to fight full-out or perhaps something to put up with. That's what I was hoping, anyway.
The grooming itself was funny from my point of view.
Sounds of Thimble being extracted from carrier. "Damn he's big." (comment from the guy helper).
Sounds of the shaver start up. A momentary pause with some mild scrabbling and then a comment of "and strong."
I metaphorically pounded my head against the wall. I'd tried to warn them.
A little bit later. "would you look at the size of those paws!"
I suspect that at this point, Thimble got his front paws over the edge of the table and had widened them to give him the best grip possible. Thimble's feet don't look that big (not when you take into account his overall size) until he spreads his toes apart, and then they look monstrously huge and way too big for his sixteen pound frame.
But the trim only took a few minutes, all told, and Thimble was fine, if a little ticked off.
Thimble is quite capable of taking care of his own fur, and he did not appreciate me having someone else do things to his fur. He remained ticked for the next three days. For Thimble, this meant that although he followed me around as usual and stayed with me and hung out as usual, he also remembered he was ticked every so often and pulled away to just beyond arm's reach, in order to express his displeasure. He also walked around with his tail clamped to his butt enough to cover the shaved spot--and then the rest of his very long tail went back up into the air.
He's back to normal now. Tail in the air, cuddling as usual.
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