Sick kitty

Nope, didn't get much sleep last night. Not with the boy cat, Gunner, throwing up twice an hour from 3 AM to 7 AM, at which point I finally rolled out of bed and called the Animal Emergency Center (but not before losing several hours of sleep 1) taking it in turns with Mitch to clean up after Gunner, and 2) fretting that Gunner had come down with some rare parasite that would quickly hop from him to Sparrow to Mitch to me and take us all out quietly before the vet opened for regular business hours on Monday).

Instead of a leisurely Sunday morning breakfast and a walk to church, etc., Mitch and I wound up in the waiting room of AEC with an eerily quiet and wide-eyed Gunner tucked away in the back corner of his cat carrier. We shared the waiting room with a labradoodle, the labradoodle's young, quiet owner, and two sleepy looking ladies who informed us, in a lengthy monologue, that they saved abandoned cats and were here with two kittens who had heart trouble but had outlived even the doctor's most ambitious guesses ("Wouldn't last the month, they said, but here she is, a strapping six-month-old kitten!" and so on).

By the time we got Gunner into the exam room and out of the carrier, he started in on his best contortionist tricks, wriggling out of arms and under hands and hopping from table to counter and (almost) into drawers. After the bit with the thermometer, he was quite distrusting, but once the assistant left to fetch the doctor, Mitch and I won him over with belly rubs and ear scratches and games so that when the doctor arrived Gunner was on his back on the exam table, paws up, purring at top volume.

"He really is sick," we told the vet, "we swear."

She checked him out, wrapped him up in what she called a "Gunner burrito" (a towel) and whisked him away to give him some shots. We took him home and he promptly threw up three times in the middle of the living room before disappearing behind a wingback chair for the better part of an hour--but now he's curled up on the couch with Sparrow, out cold. This is an improvement over the pacing and the melancholy lounging that he was doing this morning, and it is certainly an improvement over the regular puking. Hopefully this bodes well.