Saturday Bloody Saturday

I can now take comfort in the fact that it is not simply our ineptitude that prevents Sid, our cat, from accepting his fate when accosted with the nail clipping tool.

Normally, each time we remove the clippers from their secret home under the sink, we go into reconnaissance mode, slinking around corners, one of us with a hand behind the back, the other nonchalantly carrying a towel, always closing steps between us and the orange blur that streaks from hiding place to hiding place. Once we trick Sid into thinking he's going to get some satisfying lap time, it becomes a feline wrestling match as I attempt to keep three of his four paws concealed in the towel, the only protection I have from his thrashing, scrambling claws. Meanwhile, Amy's responsibility is to keep his exposed paw stilled long enough to clip the nails to a respectible length.

So, when we took Sid to the vet this past Saturday, we let the veternary assistant take on the task which we had evidently failed. As she clipped his front paws, Sid began his characteristic dance of escape, transforming into his usual liquid state, squirting between the assistant's arms and torso. But, to his chagrin, his attempts at escape were deftly thwarted and his weapons of choice were blunted in rather short order.

His back paws proved to be more problematic, however. About this time, a second assistant wandered into the room and upon seeing her struggling compatriot, she joined the cause. As the second assistant put a feline sleeper hold on the front portion of Sid's body, the first assistant continued to clip away while Sid viciously kicked in vain. (Yes, I know. Another terrible pun.)

Soon, though, it was all over and Sid, Amy, and I returned home no worse for the wear. Or so we thought. For the rest of the afternoon, I noticed that Sid would habitually bite and chew at one of his back claws. So, as we settled down to watch a movie that evening, Amy noticed a spot of blood where Sid had been sitting. Apparently, whatever had been irriating him and causing him to chew had been successfully removed by his efforts, thereby opening a wound that for the next three hours, refused to heal. It did not refuse to heal for only biological reasons, of course. Each time we attempted to put a dash of that blood-stopping powder on the wound, Sid would lick it off as soon as we let him out of our grip.

Eventually, we were able to fashion a makeshift booty of gauze that we quickly and crudely taped around his paw, causing him to walk as if stuck in an infinte conga line, the other three paws moving as usual, the fourth one doing a quick, rhythmic shake to the side in an effort to kick the booty away. Fortunately, the booty remained strapped to his paw and Sid laid down for a much needed nap. And after a time, so did we.