wickedqueen.net

Written mid-afternoon; posted from the motel in Harrisburg, PA*

—

What makes Legba so difficult to medicate, aside from the fact that he is near 20 pounds of solid muscle, is his absolute terror of almost everything. When you try to give him, say, a tranquilizer, he is 20 pounds of solid muscle fighting for his life. As Dad discovered at 6:15 this morning.

So he didn’t get a tranquilizer. It was touch and go there for a few minutes whether we were going to be able to get him out of my parents’ basement, but fortunately I’d had the foresight not to feed him for over 12 hours, so he was eventually lured out from the depths of a pile of boxes and plywood with chicken ‘n’ cheese flavored moist treats.

Even then it was a damn good thing that one of my cat carriers has a top-loading option. A 20-pound cat in near-seizures of terror sticks out in many and ever-shifting directions, and is difficult to push into a carrier through the front.

Pandora, however, is the real problem cat when it comes to traveling, and we were able to pill her with little difficulty. She only weighs about 12 pounds and much of it is pudge. She once yowled for five and a half hours straight while being transported in the car, and she only stopped because we reached our destination. Not the kind of traveling companion you want on a two-day drive from Missouri to Boston.

So we got tranquilizers from the vet, along with a wonderful pill gun contraption for sticking them down kitty throats–Pandora might be easier to restrain than Legba, but she’s still pretty bad about taking pills, so it’s nice we had the pill gun. It’s been 7.5 hours on the road now and nary a peep. Legba’s made a little noise, but not that much. He doesn’t have Pandora’s persistance.

(Bart isn’t much for vehicular yowling anyway, but I figured he’d be happier sedated, and he’s the easiest to medicate of the three.)

So we’re currently in Ohio. It’s grey. We stop every 90 minutes so that I can walk around and not get a blood clot (I am also wearing my prescription compression pantyhose.) We’re listening to Freakonomics on CD, which I kept meaning to read all last year, so that’s improving.

—

Motel update: Miraculously, none of the cats went to the bathroom in their carriers in 15 hours in the car (yes, we drove 15 hours–we’re hoping to get into Boston with some daylight left tomorrow). We’ve let them out to wander around as they please. Legba is still hiding inside one of the carriers, but at least he ate. Pandora is rolling around on the bed demonstrating how adorable she is. I feel sort of bad about not putting my laptop away and petting her for three hours as she so clearly feels is her due.

I owe a special thanks to Deborah Carr for her recommendation of travel litterboxes. They are great.

—

*There’s a song by Josh Ritter called “Harrisburg” that I absolutely love. It is perfect for singing mournfully when you’ve been drinking.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 6th, 2007 at 9:51 pm and is filed under travel, cats, mundane happenings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.