I did something a few minutes ago that I haven’t done in over thirty years. I made myself a stiff drink. A cat entered my life this morning. She is a pretty thing about 3 years old. She is a tortise-shell and there was a mass hanging off her stomach by her back leg. She was friendly, not feral, so I was able to pick her up, wrap her in a towel and take her upstairs. When I rolled her gently over on her back, I was horrified to see gaping wounds in her belly and maggots in the holes. I called my vet who told me just to start flushing the wounds out with hydrogen peroxide, that won’t kill the visitors, but it will drive them out. So there I went, pouring cups of peroxide down these craters, while this sweet kitty just lay there trusting me. Then- holy toledo- they came out like bats out of a cave! There were hundreds of them. My stomach lurched, and I called back Ben and fled to the vet.

It took us both one hour to clean her out. She was for the most part pretty good about all the abuse going on. The holes were deep and every time Ben thought he got all of the hitchhikers, more would pour out. She only bit me once. It was also discovered that she had been declawed (front only thank God, not all four paws) and she had been part of a feral colony once because of her tipped ear.

She is at the vet’s until Thursday. Bless his heart, he is charging me nothing for the Sunday visit , the boarding, the meds, the isolation ward. She smells like death which is why she is in the isolation ward. And had it not been for the maggots, she would have died, but they ate all the dead infected tissue and all the bacteria. Her diagnosis- acute septic mastitis.

Every time I close my eyes, Isee the wounds with the maggots pouring out. That is why I took a drink.