‘Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?’ he asked. ‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop.’” –Lewis Carroll
The first thing you need to understand about Petey is that he’s not your average 5 year old cat. I don’t know whether something went wrong at birth, or whether somewhere in his lineage you can find a box of rocks masquerading as a cat, but the fact is: Petey just isn’t very smart. He’s beautiful. He’s sweet. He’s exuberant. He’s essentially a 6 month old kitten in a grown cat’s body. And I love him for it.
That’s important because Petey acting like your average lethargic, all-sleep-all-the-time cat was my first clue that something was wrong. If Petey isn’t following me everywhere, it usually means he’s up to no good. Absent the sound of things crashing to the floor, his big sister Lilikoi shrieking, or a blur of white fur flying up the stairs, I knew there was something wrong. Something majorly wrong.
So, I put on the giant fireplace gloves, corralled the boy and loaded him thrashing and crying into the carrier and hauled him off to the vet. I had no real symptoms to describe other than some runny eyes and a sense that the boy just wasn’t quite right.
We left with a bottle of oral antibiotics and a tube of eye ointment. It all went downhill fast from there.
(Fortunately, we’re far from the end.)
