So here is the story of how I ended up kitty-bitten. We needed to change the IV from one arm of a very sweet and docile cat named Nehma to the other arm. You need to switch them once a week in order to keep the veins from becoming infected (in people too). Last week we’d inserted the IV with absolutely no complaints or upset in the least from Nehma.

Now, generally you would give a cat at least a mild sedative for this procedure (if not knock them out entirely). The vet decided against that for two reasons, the first being how docile she is but the more important consideration was the potential danger of the sedation. Anytime you sedate a cat (or a person) there is the possibility the patient will go into a coma and die (this actually happened just last week to a 5 year old girl who was sedated for a routine dental procedure). In Nehma’s case, in particular, the danger was heightened because of her condition. Nehma has been unable/unwilling to eat on her own and so is being fed through a feeding tube inserted in her neck, though in the last few days of last week she had begun to nibble a bit on her own, a very good sign. She has severe diarrhea and even with every test known to mankind done on her, we have no idea what is causing it. When she was sedated at the Beit Dagan (our major specialist animal hospital in the country) for an exploratory surgery to see what could be wrong with her gastrointestinal system, she very nearly died. Thankfully she has shown significant improvement on the antibiotics she is getting but, given her previous reaction to sedation, we decided to try the procedure without it.

A clue that she might not behave as docilely as previously was when I took her from the cage and put her on the fold down from the wall table next to it. She purred and nuzzled against me…but when Ronen came into the room, she turned her back on him and wanted to go back into the cage. “Ah yes, I’m always the bad guy, aren’t I? I’m just trying to help, Nehma,” he cooed at her and petted on her, while she pushed her face into my stomach. Still, she was very quiet and sweet while we stretched out her arm and the vet started up the electric razor and shaved her arm. This is usually the point at which a cat will freak out if they are going to freak out but she didn’t bat an eye.

We got the cord around her upper arm and she kind of mildly snapped at it. We still weren’t concerned. I could not hold her in the scruff position as tightly as I normally would because she has the feeding tube sticking out of her neck. When the vet tapped her vein to plump it up, she growled. The vet inserted the needle into the vein and…she went utterly ballistic. Who knew that this little cat had such strength?! She slashed Ronen with her claws, arched and twisted her back, with her back legs sending the pills, the instruments, and everything else that sits on the shelf against the wall crashing to the floor. Her blood was shooting everywhere from the uncapped IV needle, making for a slipperly and slick situation and our hands were quickly covered in it. Hissing, spitting, and, despite both Ronen and I trying to scruff her, twisting out of our hands as we tried to avoid the slashing claws and biting jaws– she was on the loose.

Now the room is small with not much room for two people to maneuver in, especially once the table has been opened. You literally have to squeeze past one another to move from one side of the room to the other. Two walls of the room are lined with large cages stacked one atop the other 3 high (3rd row being above my head and I need to use the step stool to reach them), all holding animals, and a row of smaller empty “transfer” wire cages on the very top (I’d need a tall ladder to reach them). Now Nehma wanted to get into her cage (or anywhere else but where we were) but when the table is put into the upright position, the door to her cage is blocked shut. So she threw herself at the cages, hissing and spitting, tubes hanging out of her and flopping in all directions, and climbed like she was going for the Olympic Gold medal. Spiderman has nothing on this cat.

Predictably, kitty in tier number 3 had a major freak out when Nehma climbed past at lightening speed and began throwing itself around in the cage, hissing and spitting, but the biggest problem was when she hit the top tier of empty smaller cages at the very, very top. TIMBER! Right, the smaller cage started to tip over off the top as she clung to it. Ronen managed to slap the table into down position (sending further things flying) and reach way up and grab her. I was trying to reach between him and the cages to keep kitty in tier 3’s cage from toppling down along with the cage above. When he pulled her away, the top cage came with her as she had it in a death grip with her front claws and teeth. Her back claws were raking his stomach and arms and the cage was now hanging down from her claws and banging into kitty #2’s cage in tier 2. “Get the cage, get the cage!” It was when I managed to extract the cage from her death grip that she bit. She sunk her teeth into the fleshy part where the thumb meets the hand and held on to me this time with a death grip. “AH Jaysus!” Free of the cage which had fallen to the floor with a hellacious noise just after she sunk her teeth into me, she was now twisting around like a wild dirvish, claws striking out everywhere and only her head steady with its grip on my hand. When I attempted to loosen her death grip on my thumb, she re-bit, then re-bit again and then let go but like lightening latched onto the other hand that I’d been using to try to pry her jaws open with.

Ronen is yelling “let go of her! let go of her!” and I was like “Let go of her!!! She’s the one that won’t let go of me!” I still do not know how he managed to get her cage door open but as soon as the three of us maneuvered around to where she saw the open door in close reach she let go of me and used Ronen’s stomach as a spring board to shoot inside. We slammed the door shut and Ronen grabbed a syringe, filled it with sedative and then reached in and sedated her, not fully, just mildly. We both ran and quickly washed our hands (we were covered in our blood and in hers) and then ran back in, pulled her out, set up the table, disinfected it, disinfected her, and finished connecting her to the IV drip. She was able to snap and growl but only feebly this time. We checked the feeding tube, disinfected the area around it, put some antibiotic ointment on it, and put her back in her cage. The room was an unholy disaster zone. We went and scrubbed thoroughly and then rubbed antiseptic on the wounds for a full five minutes (the stuff you use to disinfect a patient for surgery). Then we had to go back in and clean up the room and clean and treat the rest of the cats we hadn’t gotten to in that room and a few that were held in one of the surgery rooms. After cleaning each cage we went back and repeated the wash and 5-minute antiseptic routine. Nu, not much help was that antiseptic.

The good news is that Nehma’s lack of docility clearly shows she is feeling much better than a week ago…