Hanna-Barbera got it wrong. Who knew?

It's been an interesting week. I was working from home last Friday and while I was in my office, I heard a crashing noise. I was on the phone and figured one of the cats had knocked something over, so I didn't think much about it.

About a half hour later, Jesse, our Siamese, limped in to the office and sat there on his back legs like a woodchuck. I picked him up and flipped him over and instantly knew what happened. He had jumped up on the top of the blazing wood stove, apparently not knowing that hot=pain.

All the tough outer skin on his paw pads was blistered off and hanging, and underneath was swollen, red, raw skin. Just looking at it made my feet hurt. So I immediately called my boss, logged off and drove him to the vet. She had to clip the blistered skin off of 3 of his feet, apply ointment and bandages, and give him an antibiotic. All to the tune of $250 bucks or thereabouts.

That's not the bad part. The bad part is that we have to change the bandages twice a day for about three weeks, give him antibiotics and keep him secluded from the other two cats because he isn't supposed to scratch around in their litter. Instead, he gets to use this horrible shit made from compressed newspapers that looks exactly like rabbit food pellets (except they're grey) and is about as absorbent as it sounds, which is to say I might as well fill the litterbox with m&m's.

He's been amazingly tolerant of the whole twice-a-day procedure, and his paws are healing up nicely. The pain medication makes him think he's invincible, and he beats the hell out of his feet -presumably, because they don't hurt. The drug also turns him into a crazy wild beast who won't sleep and is determined to chew his own legs off, so we've stopped giving it to him.

The problem we have now is that his paws dry out and crack and start to bleed, so we've been pretty religious about changing out the bandages. We feel horrible that this happened, and it's partially my fault for leaving the kettle off the top of the stove -- but still, he has to take at least part of the blame. The other cats never did that shit, and he's supposed to be the smart one.

I know you're all thinking, "Who cares? We don't want to hear about your cat. Entertain us! That's what we pay you for!"

With that in mind, there is one funny thing that came out of all this. Every time we change his bandages, he does this for the first five minutes:



And I laugh my ass off. Every single time. I'm mean.