Hello, and welcome to your Yearly Post about our Buddies in Costa Rica! Okay, hopefully going forward, they will be a little closer together than a year (and four months). But Maynard had an adventure recently that I really couldn’t NOT write about. So here goes.
Maynard has had his share of adventures since we moved to Costa Rica. Like the time he got to go hang out by the pool in his carrier. And that time he walked through the screened porch door that had blown open in the wind and ended up behind the house at the sliding doors, meowing to come in, Stella watching him dispassionately from the living room.
But his biggest adventure to date happened on Easter Monday, about a month ago. The day started out pretty much like any other one around here. Sean had played with each of the buddies before the start of his workday. He used a string toy on a stick and another very long (about 4 feet, or 1.2 meters) piece of striped blue and green nylon ribbon that had come out of a pair of my shorts. So far, all good.
The day went by uneventfully until I left the house to take some wood over to a friend’s house, and when I got back, there was a little puddle of saliva on the porch, with one-quarter of the vomited-up four-foot long ribbon in it, slightly knawed on one end.
Ruh roh.
I called for Sean and the two of us started checking each of the cats to see who might have swallowed it, although I think we both knew who it was. Maynard has an ongoing obsession with eating things that aren’t food, primarily plastic, and we have learned to make significant changes to the way things like trash cans and boxes are handled in our house (high altitude for the former and out of the house immediately for the latter due to the tape).
So when I came around the corner in the kitchen and Maynard was giving me his best Princess Diana look (you know the one–head slightly down and to one side, eyes up beseechingly), I knew instantly he had the rest of that damn string inside him.
Sean was not so sure. He went on an immediate and thorough search of the house, convinced that there was NO FREAKING WAY a cat that size could swallow a length of ribbon four feet long.
I let him look (heck, I even helped him) but in my heart I knew the truth. Maynard’s belly was full of three feet of ribbon and it was going to shortly be making its way to his bowels. Which was going to be disastrous.
So, once again, we jumped in the car with a cat in a carrier (does it seem like a bit of a theme with us?) and rushed him to the nearest vet, 30 minutes away. The vet checked him over, took his temp, looked at the ribbon part that had already come up, and agreed with Sean that he felt it was very unlikely that a piece of ribbon three times that long was still in him. So we gave him Valium to try to make him vomit it back up, just in case (it didn’t work, by the way), and then we went home to wait it out. We were instructed to watch for vomiting (signaling an obstruction) and to make sure he was pooping. Also to check the poop. Thoroughly.
When we got home, Maynard and I spent a nice little vacation in the guest room, waiting for his internal guest to come out, one way or the other. We researched other cases where similar things had happened, and Sean just kept checking the house, trying to think of any place where the rest of the string could be. Maynard, for his part, was acting fairly normal, pretty relaxed, would even let us touch his stomach. So after a day went by, and then another day, and another without seeing any sign of the string from either end, even I started to believe that maybe it wasn’t actually in there. Logically speaking, it just didn’t make sense that it would be.
Fast forward ten days. Yes, TEN. I was now in the States, two hours earlier than Sean. I had already gone to bed when the following drama unfolded:
Sean noticed that Maynard had started vomiting earlier in the evening while I was still awake, but only saliva. He usually does this when he eats plastic, so we rationalized that he may have found a little piece from the packing for the ceiling fan we had just had installed.
Then, later in the evening, Maynard vomited up his treats, which is not at all like him. He began pawing at his face, and when Sean checked inside his mouth, he saw just the hint of something blue and green in there, waaay back in his throat. Maynard gagged again, and it came out a little more.
Sean had reached a pretty critical decision point, and, like the incident with Mister and the coat hanger lo these many years ago (https://buddies-eclectic.com/?p=189), he had to make it all by himself. He realized that if he didn’t take advantage of this opportunity, he may not have another one.
So he heroically reached his fingers into Maynard’s mouth, grabbed the ribbon, and started gently and cautiously pulling. I should pause here to say that Sean never believed that, even if that ribbon WAS in there, that it was as long as I said it was. And it didn’t come out all at once, because Maynard wasn’t loving having a string pulled from his belly out of his mouth, and tried to run away. But Sean was determined and insistent, and he grabbed Maynard again, and slowly, VERY slowly, proceeded to pull out what turned out to be three feet and one inch of string from Maynard’s tiny body. He said it stunk to high heaven and Maynard was pretty traumatized, but at least it was out, and he could tell that it was the end of the string. The ten-day ordeal of constantly worrying about Maynard was finally over. All because Sean was observant, patient, and happened to be right beside him when all this unfolded.
Maynard had a couple of days there where we were calling him Kim Carnes. His voice had a growly, scratchy quality that was quite a divergence from his normal dulcet trills. After a few days, he reached reverse puberty and his voice started breaking–in the opposite direction. By the time I came home a few days after that, it was completely back to his high-pitched, trill-y self.
And new protocols around the storage of the kitty toys have now been implemented.
I would love to say that Maynard has been entirely Adventure-Free ever since. But about a week after that, he was bitten on the hind quarters by something and went tearing around the house like a mad cat. (Note to self: Maynard cannot tolerate Benedryl and will drool ropy lengths that would make Cujo blush if you attempt to give it to him.) Once that was over, he had a day when he walked around the house with a pronounced limp, probably from a leap off a piece of furniture gone awry. I don’t know when Maynard decided to become the Mayor of Trouble Town, but I’m hoping he gets it out of his system soon so we can go back to normal things. Like eating the plastic out of the bathroom trash-cans.