An Ex-Blog – Comments Are Closed

It had been a tough day at work and I was shattered. One of the lads I work with offered to give me a lift home. Just as well, because I didn’t have the energy to walk.

Arrived home to discover my neighbours milling around outside my front door. What’s going on here, I wondered.

“We’re trying to catch a cat”, Blonde Neighbour informs me.

“A cat?”, I ask. “Why?”

“The poor dear’s been knocked down and we’re trying to get it to a vet.”

“You won’t catch it by hanging around my front door.”

“The poor thing is terrified and it ran under the car while we were trying to catch it, and now we can’t get to it. So we’re going to wait for it to come out again.”

It was probably the lack of sleep, combined with exhaustion, that led me to utter: “OK, lets have a look then.”

Before I realise it, I’m down on my hands and knees trying to locate an injured cat under a car parked outside my house. I can just about make out the cat’s hind legs hanging down from the engine of the car. Judging by the way they’re hanging, both legs are broken. Obviously the cat tried to climb into the engine, but with both of its back legs broken, it couldn’t fully lift itself off the ground. It’s not going to be easy getting this cat out.

Now I’m lying on my back with my left arm reaching around underneath the car searching for the cat’s head. By touch alone I manage to grab the cat by the scruff. Then I realise there’s another problem. The cat has managed to jam its head between two metal bars. These bars are preventing the cat from going up, down, left or right. There’s only one way for the cat to go, but it’s the one way my arm won’t go. The human elbow is a remarkable joint, but there are just some ways that it won’t bend – not without involving a lot of cracking noises and me crying like a little girl. Time to try another way.

Finally with a lot of repositioning and not a little swearing I manage to get a good grip on the cats scruff and pull it free. Just because it’s free doesn’t mean that it still doesn’t want to get away. So it makes a break for it – with both back legs being dragged pitifully behind.

It breaks for the far side of the car. Brunette Neighbour heads it off. It makes a dash for my side of the car. I grab the box from Blonde Neighbour and drop it in front of the cat. Success! The cat is in the box. I repeat, the cat is in the box.

As if this is something I do everyday, I nonchalantly close the top of the box, and that’s when the cat bites me. The ungrateful little bugger actually bit me. And he got a nice little chunk of my index finger.

“The little bastard bit me!”

“Are you alright?”, asks Blonde Neighbour. She sounds a little concerned. But just a little.

“I’ll be OK, but I’ll have to get a tetanus shot.”

“Oh no. I’m so sorry, but we have to get the cat to the vet. There’s a vet on-call and she’s waiting for us.”

“Oh, right. But I have to get a tetanus shot.”

At this stage I’m worried that my act of (minor) heroism will be overshadowed by an injured cat. (Did they not see that mange-ridden, ball of spite bite me on the finger?)

“We have to go to the vets office in Thomandgate. Anybody know where it is?”

Then my lift home pipes up. He sat there for twenty minutes while I scrabbled around on the ground rescuing the cat, and this is his contribution:

“I know where it is. I’ll give you a lift.”

Wait a second. The phrase “The bloody cat just bit me. I have to get a tetanus shot. ” is not registering with anybody. I might as well have been talking to myself.

The cat is rushed to the on-call vet. I’m left standing, alone, outside my front door. I haven’t even made it inside yet. Feelings of abandonment are being to surface, but they’re rapidly pushed aside by feelings of anger and retribution. That bloody cat better be brought back here because I’m going to kick it across the car park.

I’d better call a doctor and get my tetanus shot.

Where’s my phone? Check my pockets – not there. Check my jacket – not there either. Please tell me that I didn’t leave in the car. The car that is at this present time rushing through town with an injured cat.

I borrow my flatmates phone to ring my own.

Brrring, brrring.

There’s a vibration in my back left pocket. It’s my phone. How did I miss it? Oh yeah, I have only one usable hand at the moment, so I couldn’t check that pocket.

Time to ring the doctor. I ring the local health service emergency number. Only to be told that they don’t deal with the part of the city that I live in. I’m told to contact my local GP. So I ring my GP. Only this time I get a recorded message – the GP’s off-duty and I have to contact the on-call GP. I have about 20 cent credit left on my phone. This is does not bode well.

As it turned out, I was right. It didn’t bode well. I managed to get through to the on-call doctor, but there’s nothing that he can do for me. (More likely there’s nothing that he wants to do for me). So it’s off to Accident and Emergency for me. My feelings for the cat are rapidly escalating, and not in a good way.

Seeing that I am very obviously pissed off at this stage, my flatmate gives me a lift to the hospital. It’s now 10pm on a Sunday evening, so I’m resigned to the fact that I will be spending the next few hours in a waiting room. I bring a book. Might as well do something constructive with my time.

By half ten, I’m on my way home. I’ve just paid the hospital €65 for the privilege of having a rather long needle inserted in my backside and a prescription for antibiotics. One taxi later, and I’m home. I’m exhausted, and I finally get some sleep.

You’d think that would be the end of the story. But no. There’s more.

Apparently it’s very rare, but I have a reaction to the tetanus shot. It results in my leg seizing up occasionally. Nothing major. Unless of course you work in a job that requires you to be on your feet all day. A job like mine that is.

To add insult to injury, we have a booking for 120 kids. They’re having a karaoke competition. Isn’t that great? 120 kids filled with cola, and screaming into a microphone for 2 hours. You can imagine my mood.

I’m stuck doing the bar, so I head out back to fill the ice bucket. My leg seizes up as I’m going down a small ramp, and before I know it I’m on the floor holding my twisted ankle. Between the pain in my leg, and the pain in my ankle, all I can think of is that bloody cat.

I struggle to my feet and hobble back to work. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. The bar is closing at 10pm, so I get to go home early.

We have shutters on the bar. Shutters which we pull down when the bar is closed. I’m in the bar, so I’m responsible for closing the shutters. I reach up to close the last one. All my weight is on one leg. My sore leg. At just that moment it seizes up again.

I bounce off the counter, perform a half twist (a 9.5 from the German judge), and bounce off the shelf under the bar counter. My colleague hears the noise, turns around and is greeted with the sight of me on the floor, (again), cursing, swearing and describing in graphic detail the future of one particular cat.

I struggle to rise myself, hobble down the bar and out the back for a cigarette. Behind me are the sounds of the entire bar laughing at me. It strikes me that at this stage I most resemble the cat under the car.

Over the next couple of days my leg returns to normal. Life seems to be improving. Then Blonde Neighbour calls into the bar.

After a couple of minutes telling her about my miserable experience, I ask the question that’s been plaguing me since Sunday night.

“How’s the cat?”

“Oh the cat was put down. Her back was broken, she was dehydrated, and she had maggots. It’s all very sad. But luckily, the vet didn’t charge us anything.”

I was speechless. Blonde Neighbour obviously knows nothing about luck.

And neither does the cat, because if I got my hands on it, maggots would have been the least of it’s problems.