Saturday, October 20, 2007

History Repeats



Sherman, set the Wayback machine for a little under 40 years ago. Young little Marius sees the kitty on top of the dishwasher. Dumb little Marius grabs kitty. Kitty, afraid she's falling, extends her landing gear. Little Marius' eye, meet Tai's claw. Much wailing and blood; parents panic; race to ER; 'did we just blast through a stop si...CRASH!!'

Ultimately all was ok. The cat only scratched my eyelid, and I don't think anyone was hurt in the wreck. I wore a patch for a few days and had to endure some eye drops. Unfortunately Tai ended up getting declawed despite her innocence in the whole affair.

Fast forward to yesterday. The Kitties-O-The-Apocalypse are tearing around the house, doing their best to rearrange the walls, and maybe the ceiling, when up gets the Child-O-The-Apocalypse. COA sees KOAs and decides to get some fuzzy loving. Despite having been warned many, many times not to mess with the felines when they are playful I suddenly hear the all-too familiar siren of pain. As usual she won't say what's wrong, and since she reacts exactly the same whether she has stubbed her toe or removed a limb I can't tell if I need to worry or not. Finally she says that the cat scratched her eye. RED ALERT!! I get her to take her hand away and see blood inside her eye. PANIC!! HONEY, GET UP! WE HAVE TO GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM!!! We start racing around to get some clothes on(did I mention it was 6:30am?) when a trickle of rational thought, and long dimmed memories seep into my consciousness. I have the child step under the light and pry her eye open again. No more blood, just clear tears, and now I can see that the cat only got her eyelid. So we relax and decide that we'll put a cool compress on it, and take her to the doctor once they open. We lay her down with a wet washcloth and within 5 minutes she's refusing to stay put and wanting to play. We ultimately decide that the doctor is not needed, and by lunchtime she's acting like nothing ever happened.

The moral of the story is that we can learn from history. Oh, and keep your face away from playful cats.

Hasta,
Marius

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

No, we did not learn from history. The lesson here is cats are bad. And since the cats are still in the house..........

stinkypaw said...

HEY, Monkey, cats are not bad! Cats are sneeky, granted. They can even be vicious! But they're not bad!
(sorry, just had to voice myself a little here... all done!)

We all can learn from history, if we don't panic, which we too often do. But we don't mess around with eyes, especially not around claws!

Anonymous said...

Years ago, I had an incident with one of my cats while I was sleeping. Something startled Rani (remember her, M?) and she used my face as a launching pad to leap up onto the bookcase headboard of my bed. We went to the ER and discovered if her claw had gone just a little deeper, I probably would have lost my eyesight in that eye. My eyelid looked like hamburger for a little while, but not you can't even tell. And my eyesight is sooooo good, I can still tell that Clay Aiken is gorgeous!