Phoebe, Our Beloved Cat

 Seventeen years ago we rescued a kitten from the local animal shelter.  The kids had wanted a cat, especially my daughter Haley.  She was the one who picked her out.  When this precious little feline creature came into our lives, she was so tiny, but feisty.  Haley became her surrogate mother.  She was insistent the Phoebe needed a bath daily, just like her and so she commenced.  At the time, Cabbage Patch dolls were all over our house and you guessed it, they began sharing their wardrobe with Phoebe.  As Phoebe got older, she was less inclined to allow anyone to hold her, let alone dress her up in doll clothes.  She was never the less a member of our family and had regular routines, just like we did.

Phoebe was about five years old now and one of her routines was to wait on the steps for my husband to come home from work.  She could be hiding anywhere in the house and hear is truck coming down the street and suddenly appear.  Everyday when he would come in the door, the first thing he did was head down the basement steps and use the bathroom.   Phoebe would be right on his heels and slide into the bathroom with him before he shut the door.  On this day, the kids were scattered around the house and I was in the kitchen cooking dinner.  My husband had made is usual trek down to the bathroom with Phoebe in tow.  I heard the craziest sounding cat scream and didn't even turn around, I just yelled for the kids to stop teasing the cat.  The next thing I knew, the crazy sound got louder and crazier and I heard a thump, thump, thump up the steps toward the bedrooms.  I stopped what I was doing and turned around and had attempted to start yelling at the kids when I saw splatters of blood ricocheted up the white hall walls toward the bedrooms.  I was dumbfounded.  I couldn't even get "what the......" out of my mouth when my husband came up the steps from the basement holding something up in the air.  I asked what it was and he said it was the end of Phoebes tail.  There he was, holding the signature white puff that use to live on the end of her gray tail.  I bolted up the steps, following the path of blood on the wall into of course, our bedroom.  The only room in the house with white carpet and more white walls.  We had a water bed at the time that had a large headboard with a ten inch gap at the base, just enough room for an injured cat to squeeze into.  The kids had all gathered at the door of the bedroom squealing and upset because they saw the blood and wanted to know what had happened to Phoebe.  They were all yelling at the same time for me to get her.  My husband and I were both frantic.  This was our family cat, hurt and bleeding under the bed and somehow, the end of her tail had been chopped off.

She wasn't making any noise, but she was bleeding like a stuck pig.  I layed down on the floor and tried to scoop her out and she growled and hissed at me. Oh man, she was really hurt and mad.  I was afraid she would bite me.  I told my husband that we were going to have to chase her out from the other side and catch her in something to take her to the emergency animal hospital.  I got a pillowcase out and a hockey stick.  My husband stood at the receiving end with the pillowcase and I started trying to push her gently with the hockey stick.  She growled and then shot out the other side toward my husband.  He caught her in the pillowcase and quickly shut it.  He walked around the other side of the bed with her kicking and fighting inside the pillowcase.  The blood was soaking through pretty fast.  The kids were now crying and yelling so many different things I couldn't think straight.  I made eye contact with my oldest son and told him to keep everyone in the house until we got back that we were going to take Phoebe to the emergency vet. 

I sat in the front seat of my husbands work truck with Phoebe thrashing around on my lap.  Luckily, the emergency vet was only about five minutes away.  We walked in with our poor cat yowling like nothing I had ever heard before.  The nurse took her from us and shut the door.  While we waited, I asked my husband what happened.  He said that he wasn't paying attention and shut the door to the bathroom.  He said that she must have turned around because the end of her tail was on the inside of the bathroom on the floor with the door shut.  This was going to be interesting trying to explain this to our five kids without them getting ticked off at their dad and laying blame for Phoebes current pain.

An hour later, the nurse came out with Phoebe.  She had a cast on her tail and was moaning.  We signed the papers, took the bag with antibiotics and went back home to our kids.  They were all waiting at the door.  Of course they all wanted to hold Phoebe and take care of her.  I explained that they had to leave her alone and let her rest.  When I set her down, she took off and hid.  I figured that would happen.  She wanted to be left alone, she was in pain.

The next morning, I was the first one up.  I walked down the steps to see if I could find Phoebe only to find her sitting on the foyer floor bleeding again, WITH NO CAST!  She had chewed her cast off!  I went and got my husband out of bed and we made tracks for the emergency vet again.  They took her back in, replaced her cast, gave a shot for pain and sent us back home, this time with pain pills.  Why hadn't they given them to us in the first place?  She was probably going crazy with pain.  We got back home and again, Phoebe took off when I went to set her down.  My husband went off to work and my routine day started with the kids. 

My husband had called a few times during the day to check and see how Phoebe was doing and I said that I hadn't been able to find her.  She was hiding good, probably sleeping.  Later on, my husband came home and Phoebe appeared out of her hiding place and AGAIN, had chewed off her cast!  We looked at each other like a couple of lunatics!  I said, " we are not taking her back there, let's take her to the regular vet and see if he can do something different.  This isn't working!"  We called all the kids in the house, layed down the same set of rules and said that we would be back in a while.  We scooped Phoebe back up in the pillowcase and headed to our regular vet.  They immediately took her from us and went into one room, while putting us in another.  Our vet came in and asked what happened.  We told him, including the two previous visits to the emergency animal hospital.  He left us and went into the room where Phoebe was waiting.  Suddenly, the craziest screams were coming from the other room along with a lot of banging around.  We could hear things falling on the floor and muffled voices from our vet and the two assistants!  It was like something out of a bad comedy.  About a ten minutes later, the vet walked out of the room.  My husband and I stood there looking at him, we were speechless.  Our vet was a big man and was a totally sweaty, scratched up, red mess.  It wasn't funny, but it was all we could do to contain ourselves.  Our little cat had made this huge man look like he was a wreck.  He said, "THAT CAT'S CRAZY!"  She had gotten away in the room and in his frantic effort to catch her and put her back on the table, she had been jumping all over the room.  In the process, she had scratched and bit our vet several times!

I felt bad for him but figured it was one of the hazards of the job.  I asked him why she kept chewing the cast off and he said that he was going to call the emergency vet hospital and give them a piece of his mind.  He said that they were suppose to put a collar on her along with pain pills the FIRST time and she wouldn't have been able to chew the cast off.  He said that it was an instinct for her to want to lick her wound.  He said that she should be fine now.  We collected Phoebe and were on our way.  She eventually heeled, several weeks later.  We were able to take her collar off after her return check up to the vet.  Once the pain of her injury was gone, she went right back to her same pattern of waiting for my husband to get home from work and follow him down to the bathroom.  For the rest of her life, he was always very careful to look behind him before closing the bathroom door.

Although short an inch of her tail, Phoebe lived a full and colorful life with our family until this past year.  She passed away at 17 years old. RIP Phoebe :)