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The fat orange cat is back home again! It turns out she had bad ear infections in both ears, which completely demolished her eardrums. Because she had trouble closing her eyes and controlling them, she also developed a corneal ulcer. So now we put drops in her ears every 12 hours, and put goop in her eye every six hours.

She’s not exactly 100% yet. She has a pronounced head tilt. It looks like she’s paranoid and constantly looking over her right shoulder. She also has very poor balance, causing her to flop over every time she shakes her head or sneezes, or sometimes when she walks. Mainly she just holes up in a big cardboard box right now. However, she is at home, and she should continue to get better. We take her back in two days for a re-check of the ears and eye.

Welcome home, freaky paranoid drunken half-blind hermit cat!

We have an incredibly fat cat. (The orange one in this pic.) She’s prone to weird behavior, just because she’s so danged fat.

At 11pm last night, she was just fine. Her usual freaky self. Sometime during the night, she started breathing through the mouth, which we didn’t think much of, because hey, she’s fat.

Later on during the night, she knocked a toy off of the dining room table. Again, no big deal, she’s a cat, cats knock things over in the middle of the night. That’s what they do.

At around 4:30 this morning, she was standing near our bed, mouth-breathing, but this time she was also making erratic scratching sounds, like her claws couldn’t get purchase on the hardwood floor. We turned on the light. She was foaming at the mouth and just kind of… crouching there. We called the vet. While we were on the phone, she peed right where she was standing. Cleaning up just now, I notice she also defecated a little, very loose and with a little blood. She had also thrown up in a couple of spots in the hall.

My husband is en route to a local animal medical emergency clinic with her.

Please, please don’t let this Thanksgiving be remembered as the one where I had to explain to my daughter that our cat died… and what death is all about.

UPDATE! They’ve tentatively ruled out their first guess, which was FUNGUS OR BACTERIA EATING FROM HER EAR INTO HER BRAIN and are thinking maybe toxoplasmosis – which is treatable. So far, she’s still doing okay under the care of the hospital.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful that we have the ability absorb (with difficulty) more than a grand in expenses for a cat that is honestly not our favorite. I’m also thankful that we always have Thanksgiving here at home, and thus weren’t out of town last night. AND that we live in a major city with two emergency veterinary clinics. Here’s hoping it all works out for the freaky, fat little girl.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE! Now they’ve ruled out their second guess and are leaning toward the ears again (so to speak) as the probable culprit. Our cat generates enormous quantities of hard black wax. This, apparently, is weird to the point that whenever we take her in to have them cleaned, the vet calls over other vets to look at it and marvel. So they think now maybe an inner ear thing. They’ll sedate her later (goodbye, $300!) and clean her inner ears and see what’s going on. If that’s all it is, she should recover with time, leaving her with nothing more than a mild tendency to lean her head toward the right. Because she’s not weird enough, I guess.