How many cats do you see?

[Hoof Hearted]

Oh, you think she's cute?
Let me tell you about "cute". "Cute" cost us over $400.

She knocked over my first Betta bowl and ATE the Betta.

Let me set the scene:
It was a quiet Sunday morning. I had just woke up, got breakfast and sat down at the computer. I didn't hear the fish bowl go over, but I heard a cat making the 'herking' sound that precedes throwing up, so I got up to get a wad of tissue to clean up the impending mess, and saw the Betta bowl knocked over in the bathroom...and no fish to be seen.

Well, S-Jo was only about 10mo old at the time and the Betta was a bit too big for her. She threw him up in the hallway. I didn't know if the blood was her or Cid (the Betta) and then she was having trouble breathing. Snorting and snarking with foamy bubbles coming out of her mouth. I yelled towards the garage for hubby (I thought he was out there) and ran back and forth between the phone and (dial up) computer.
The damn computer would NOT log off and I kept running to the phone to check for dial tone and kept getting that annoying squeal. I was panicking. I know I was panicking because the phone is cordless, and I continued to hang it up in the receiver and run back to the office to check the computer when I could have just carried the thing with me. I yelled (panicky scream) for Hubby again and when there was no response again, I ran into the garage and noticed my car was gone. My heart fell. We had bought a new truck for him when we moved here and I was unfamiliar with it and I just knew that if I had to do an emergency drive to the vet, I would wreck his truck because I was used to driving my 'vette, not the new truck. I was ready to yank the computer lines/plugs out of the wall when it finally freed up the phone line.
We had just moved to Georgia from across the country and I called the first vet I came across in the phone book. Closed, but they gave a number for an emergency vet which I called. The girl was trying to tell me how to get to the Emergency Vet office...someone who had never been in the STATE before...so it took a while. As we were on the phone, S-Jo began to calm down and wasn't so distressed and had stopped foaming. EV girl told me to bring her in if she continued to be distressed.
We ended up taking her in a few hours later. Her breathing wasn't distressed, but you could tell something was partially blocking it. They sedated and scoped her. Found nothing and sent her home at midnight. We got home and she had a bandage on her front leg, when we removed it...there was a FREAKIN' catheter in her vein! I called them up and they told us to bring her back in. I said no way, we both have to work tomorrow and it is already 1:30am! Talk me through this, if we experience problems THEN we'll bring her back. So, we removed it without incident. Without incident because S-Jo was still punch-drunk from the tranquilizer. She was still sounding like something was in there and she was having to breathe around it.
The next day, we kept her seperate from the kitties and when I came home at lunchtime to check her...perfectly fine!

I think a part of Cid got lodged in her nasal something and partially obstructed her breathing. Either a shake of the head or a sneeze dislodged it and she was back to normal.
I greatly dislike her interest in the Betta fish.

Hubby worked out that at $400 for S-Jo's vet visit, Cid would have cost about $7,000.00/pound at a fish market.

[Tonchi]

OMG, she IS an expensive little devil, isn't she? I adore the little furballs but i could never handle 11 of them. As I said on another thread, it is a full time job serving ONE Queen of the Universe, and it was not easy to memorize all those prayers. Her imperial pussyness is quite a handful too, but so far nothing got eaten except a National Geographic.

I had to cat-proof my house the best I could when T'Pau, Queen of the universe, arrived. My bettas survived only because I surrounded their bowls on the kitchen cabinet where they lived with mousetraps. In fact, there are still mousetraps in strategic places around the house, because I have a valuable collection of ironstone food moulds and I'm sure she she would just love to pitch them off the shelves. Unfortunately I forgot where I put them, and while reaching into the greenhouse window to pull out a plant, one of them found me. Dang, that smarts!