Kronda and Jess have a perfect house. It's small and spacious, warm and airy. With a garage. And a heating blanket at the foot of the bed, and a space heater on the bathroom counter (brilliant!) They also have three cats -- one who's been around for a while (Willow) and two adolescent kittens (the boys.) They let me stay there when they went on a honeymoon trip to Bend, and so I got to take care of the cats for a day. A little food, a little litter scooping, right? Not so fast ... it turns out that Willow wasn't the happiest cat on the block when the boys moved in, and she became unhappy. And agitated. You know what's coming next. So yes, Kronda and Jess got her a prescription for Prozac, and Willow has really mellowed out.
And I got to dose Willow up. Which turns out to be a very relaxed process because it's a cream you rub into the skin of a cat's inner ear. When I did it, I just let her sit in her favorite little bed, and I cleaned out the cream from the previous night's dosage and rubbed a little into her other ear. She just sat there and purred, mellow thing that she is now. Kronda had impressed upon me the importance of wrapping my finger in Saran Wrap, so that I wouldn't administer myself some Prozac as well (although, lord knows, I could probably benefit.)
This process reminded me of rubbing painkilling creams into my mother's skin as she was dying, and how angry I was when I found out that creams existed and hadn't been offered to her earlier, after she had had terrible difficulties with swallowing morphine. (She thought she was being poisoned, and became terrified. More accurately, she thought I was poisoning her, and she became terrified of me, and of eating or swallowing anything I gave her. Those were not the best of times.) But once we had the creams, I just put on latex gloves, and rubbed doses onto her arms, which she found soothing, not terrifying. A world of difference. And I think Willow also found it soothing, because when I finished and sat down to read, she hopped off her perch and nestled herself into my lap, and we both chilled out.
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