Incoherent Scribblings

I have often said that if my cat Mouse were a human she would be one of those women that all normal women love to hate: She would be beautiful and thin. She would chain smoke and be able to eat all she wanted but never gain a pound. She would be sickly sweet most of the time and have a way about her that would draw men to her like flies. However, if she were the slightest bit annoyed she would turn around and rip out your eyes and if you did something that she didn’t like she wouldn’t hesitate to show you her displeasure.

I say this, because except for the chain smoking part, that is exactly how Mouse is. She is a beautiful Maine Coon Cat and almost everyone who meets her adores her. She is the sweetest kitty in the world most of the time. She loves to sit on your lap and will purr for hours at a time while you pet her. But while you are petting her, if you pet the wrong spot or rub her the wrong way, she will turn around and sink her teeth into your arm with little to no warning.

Nevertheless, in addition to her wonderful personality and that random show of attitude that I love, Mouse has one attribute I have never been fond of: And that is, she produces a hairball almost daily.

Though I have learned to live with her hairballs after almost twelve years and by now am familiar with the warning signs, I have never been able to determine a rhyme or reason for her hairballs. Sometimes she throws up directly after she eats, other times she will suddenly wake up from a deep sleep to eject a hairball, and still other times she will just stop in the middle of the floor and puke.

I have tried everything to get her hairballs under control: She eats special hairball control cat food, I brush her almost everyday, I have tried to give her hairball control paste, and I have even tried castor oil and Vaseline. Nothing helps. So I just follow behind her and clean them up. Sometimes it can be exasperating, but in all honesty I don’t find it any worse than changing the litter box.

It isn’t cleaning up the hairballs that gets to me sometimes: It is the places in which she produces them. Most of the time she just throws up on our tile floor and that is easy to deal with: Just grab some toilet paper, wipe them up, and flush them away. When she throws up on the couch or on the bed I naturally get a little more irritated, because then I don’t just have to clean up the hairball, I have to wash the articles that she threw up on. Once she got into the closet while I was at work and threw up inside my laundry basket and boy did that tick me off! Luckily for me though, once the actual hairball is removed the bile that accompanies it washes out relatively easily.

However, I must say that her hairball from yesterday morning really took the cake. I was sitting behind the closed doors of the kitchen eating my breakfast when I heard that familiar gagging sound. I knew she was in the hallway, but since it is tiled I just continued eating my breakfast. I have learned I can’t stop her when she is going to throw up, so I just let her do it and when she is done I clean it up.

After I finished my breakfast I carefully stepped into the hallway (you never know where the next hairball will be) and scanned the area. She had produced her hairball under the bench on the mat where we keep our shoes. It didn’t seem like a big deal until I noticed a brown stain and that oh-so-lovely smell of fresh hairball coming directly from INSIDE my NEW Nikes!!!