Don't fuck about with kittens.
There's a little grey juvenile cat, barely more than a kitten, hanging out around our neighbourhood. He's got a pretty nasty injury on his side, and needs to see a vet. We've been trying to catch him for the past week so we can get him checked out, stitched up and either set free again or sent off to a good home.

The little bastard's too clever to go in the traps we rented from the animal rescue league. His injury is a raw, infected hole the size of an old British penny - severe enough that grabbing him and putting him in a carrier will hurt him, hence the traps. It's also serious enough to most likely kill him if left untreated, and the traps weren't working, hence why this happened.

Yesterday I was outside smoking and saw my chance. He came right up to me, purring. The cat carrier was on the back porch. It was a lovely day, so I wasn't wearing my perennial biker jacket. A call for assistance would spook him, and he'd run. I had to be natural, and sneaky.

I knew that he was going to bite, and he was going to scratch, and without my jacket, it was going to suck. I picked him up - no problems. I approached the carrier - he wriggled. I scruffed him, and brought my forearm in front of his front paws so he couldn't brace himself against the sides of the carrier. I put him in the carrier, much to his protest, and very, very nearly got the door shut.

That's when he engaged his Super Special Cat Skill - the ability to bend space and time around himself and dig a pair of bloody ditches from my elbow to my thumb. A blink later and my other arm had his teeth inside. I knew that he was going to bite, and scratch, and that it would suck - and he bit, and he scratched, and it did in fact suck, but because I was prepared for it I managed to hold on. Then he somehow managed to get a tooth on either side of my left Achilles tendon, and ripped. That was when I screamed, and the cat turned into liquid with fur on the outside and springs on the inside, and my housemate Deanna came to investigate, and wherever I grabbed there was nothing but air and whispers of fur.

So there's me, having been thoroughly defeated by an injured juvenile cat, trying to stand up and failing, and asking Deanna if we had any hydrogen peroxide. I limped upstairs to meet Emily coming down. We had no peroxide - the best we had was soap and water and witchhazel. Deanna looked up what to do while Emily helped me clean myself up and survey the damage.

Whatever that cat had, I had it now. The cat hasn't shown any signs of rabies - but you can't screw around with that, it'll kill your ass dead if you give it half a chance. We don't know the cat, and we don't know what bit him to give him that injury. A trip to the Urgent Care clinic followed. The doctor took one look, asked us if we had the cat, and when we said we didn't, she sent us straight to the emergency room.

If you get worked over by an animal that even might have rabies, you'll have to have injections around all of the puncture wounds. They suck.

I was thoroughly surprised when the large-bore needle burrowing deep into in my Achilles' tendon area made me go crosseyed. It was the sort of white-hot spiking pain that you just can't shrug off, ignore, or take yourself away from - waaaay up there in the "Most painful experiences so far" tally.

When you have rabies injections, they'll use one great big needle (with a very, very broad tip - almost like a knitting needle) and just squirt in a little bit of the stuff at each injection site. At first I tried to distract myself by chatting with Emily and Deanna and counting the injections through gritted teeth. So, y'know, I could rack up Man Points by telling people I'd had eleventy million large-bore rabies injections and totally not even flinched, mate (while leaving out the part about getting my arse kicked by a kitten). When I got to twenty, and we were still on the left-hand side of my body, I gave up counting and asked instead if the doctor could change the needle for a fresh one, since this one was getting blunt and rather than sliding smoothly into my body, it was building up many newtons of unpleasant pressure before finally breaking through my skin with an audible "plurpt."

And that was when she told me that she'd got one cubic centimeter of solution into me so far. One cubic centimeter out of eight. I looked down at the worst bite mark on my left arm - the one where the mark continued around in an unbroken circle roughly the size of the cat's mouth (yeah, he'd given me a hickey too). It looked like a balloon was slowly being inflated inside, with thin red blood and vaccine solution sweating through the injection sites. I got the feeling that if I poked it with my thumb, a dozen little fountains would spring up all around it.

So, my advice is this: don't fuck about with kittens. They'll have your face off if you give them half a chance.
(CavemanJoe lives on improbableisland.com, Thu 20 May 2010, 16:46, Reply)