The other weekend it was so nice outside that we let our cats, Nietszche and Ming, outside to enjoy the outdoors. They enjoyed themselves, I presume, and dutifully returned to the indoors when we called.
A few days after we noticed that Nietzsche was favoring one of his sides and squawking when you touched him on that side. He’s a bit of a scrapper, so we thought he might have picked a fight when he was outside, but could find no sign of wounds. He’s also old so we thought it just might be his old arthritic hips. We left it at that until today, when he was sitting on my chest and I noticed that his hair by his butt was crusty. He was facing me, so I asked Tina to take a look. She refused to look at his little butthole, so I had to turn him while holding his tail up so I could get a look. He really started to squawk then and tried to get away. But not before I could spot the problem: a little turd was peeking out.
I’d seen the same thing once before with Nietszche – he’s constipated. That time we had to take him to the vet to get a cat enema. Hopefully, the vet will be open tomorrow and we won’t have to pay emergency weekend rates. I briefly considered performing the procedure myself, but this site recommends against it.
Now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t have caved when he was begging for some of my string cheese.