Cat Tales

My cat Snaps has stitches in his ear, on the backside. No, he didn’t tear it, nor was he in a fight with our other cat, Panzi. I noticed there was a very small crusty patch on his left ear about a year ago. We have a home-visit vet and he said not to worry about it. But over the next few months, it got bigger. And sometimes the crusty top would come off and it would bleed. When it got to be about the diameter of a pencil eraser, I called our vet, and he came over to take a look. He said it probably should come off. He didn’t think it was cancer – but he didn’t know for sure.

Since we were less than a month away from their annual physical and shots, he combined his visit and found that other than the spot, he was in good health. Panzi was fine.

I dug our old cat carrier out of the storage room and brought it into the apartment to get Snaps used to it. He thought it was swell, a kind of cozy cave, and was in and out of it happily the rest of the day. Panzi, who is our senior cat, could evidently remember being put in the carrier and going off on an unpleasant trip to the vet. She wouldn’t go near it, and in fact became hard to find, just in case we meant it for her.

I put Snaps into it for a visit to the clinic for surgery. He complained only mildly on the car trip over there, unlike every other cat I’ve ever owned. All my other cats cried loudly, incessantly, when taken anywhere by car. When I moved from Madison, Wisconsin, to Minneapolis, one of my two cats actually gave herself traumatic laryngitis, and was reduced to a rasping whisper by the time we arrived.

Snaps continued to behave with surprising calm – he has always been a laid back creature. Anyway, the vet took another look at him and said he’d go right into surgery and could come home late in the afternoon.

He was good as gold on the trip home, despite the vet having found a much smaller spot on his other ear, which he closed with a special kind of glue. The vet said he was going to freeze the material he took off the ears and would hold it to see if the spots come back. If they do, he will send this material to a special clinic to have it tested to see if it’s cancer. The reason he’s not doing it now is because it costs something over a hundred dollars for the test.

Meanwhile Snaps has taken all this with aplomb. He had not pawed at the healing ears. We are keeping the cat carrier in the apartment because he has to go back to have the stitches removed in a few more days – and he still likes to go in there and play now and again. We have our fingers crossed in hopes that whatever it was on his ears, it is gone never to return.

Does anyone else have a cat who takes every happening calmly?