The Horck of Death or The Hairball

Having a cat means one very disgusting thing, hairballs.  Well, if you have a hairless cat (or as I call them, nakkid cats) maybe you don’t have a hairball issue.  I have short haired cats so I didn’t think that hairballs would be that big an issue but I was wrong.  I have, well the cats have frequent hairball issues.

One cat, Cordelia, almost always has hers on the tile floor.  It is easy to clean up and remove.  OK, I admit to making both gagging and eewwy noises if I clean hers up and it is still warm.  But the other cat, Malcolm, inevitably has his on the rug, the couch, or bed.  They are hard to clean up.

I know that he does that because one night, he was asleep on my legs when the horcking noise combined with the jingling of his collar, woke me up.  Imagine, just awaking from sleep, rising to a sitting position, just in time to see your cat horcking up a hairball on your feet.  Then what does he do, he blinks, rolls over away from the mess, and goes back to sleep.  So I do the same and clean up the mess when I get up in the morning.  I agree with Malcolm on this, never ruin your sleep no matter how slimy the problem.

So I decide to deal with the hairball issue.  I call the vet and get the recommended hairball medicine.  The hairball stuff comes in two cat approved flavors, malt or tuna.  He loves tuna, so I get that flavor.  They recommended that if he won’t eat it from the tube to smear some on his face.  It didn’t work.  Imagine, the seventeen pound tubby tabby running through the house shaking his head making his collar jingle.  Then the dog decides to get into the action. She chases the cat down to wash his face. I give up for the night.

The next day I call the vet and explain what happened.  I was then told to put some on his foot.  He would wash his foot.  Yeah, that worked.  What did he do? He ran through the house shaking his front foot and crashing into things.  So again, the dog washes the medicine off of him.  

I go to bed wondering how I can get the medicine in him?  When I get up the next morning I see the tube of hairball medicine in the living room. It is chewed up and empty.  So, the cat that gets lost in the house and forgets that his claws retract figured out how to get into the upper cabinet and only knock out the hairball medicine which the dog eats.  Just in case you were wondering hairball medicine works on dogs.  But eating the tube and its contents causes a truly disgusting issue that required yet another call to the vet.

So what was the new recommendation. Hairball formula cat food which according to one review, “Got rid of all hairballs”.  Ha, that so did not happen in my house but the other recommendation was mixing a dab of vaseline in a small amount of canned cat food.  The hairballs have decreased but every once in a while in the dead of night or when I am in the bathroom I hear the eerie sounds of the horck of death and I know that I will have to deal with the disgusting remains.