Saturday, January 06, 2007

Toilet Talk

I awoke this morning to the sound of violent abdominal convulsions.
Otherwise known as “heaving” and/or “hacking.”
Air vomiting!
The source of the racket was Jack.
He is a chronically notorious hairball-hacker!
I’ve written of this hobby of his many times, but most notably HERE, I guess. Poor Jack.

So I launched out of bed and ran to find where it was happening.
This is always important, because if I just roll over and go back to sleep, later on I will surely step on an oozing pile of cat-vom!
I need to GET to the source of the action, as fast as I can.

So there he was…. levitating, pretty much!
There’s nothing you can do really. It’s pretty much like watching someone have an epileptic seizure [as I have observed, several times]… you’ve just go to let the thing play out. You can’t make it stop!
Sometimes I will at least swirl Jack around toward a more suitable puke-zone. Often this means digging his head out of my shoes, near the door.
But today there he was, convulsing toward a patch of floor just outside the washroom. I went to the kitchen and grabbed the spray-cleaner and a new roll of paper towels, while Jack hacked.
I anticipated a routine cleanup, and it was, at first.
I got back to Jack just as he gave it the final heave-ho and “SPLORRRRRRQUE” there it was! Like a mouse in porridge!
I bent down to gather up this pile of hurl, and sort of lifted it all in this dripping wad of at least four or five sheets of paper towel. Eager to get back into bed I just threw this steaming mess into the toilet, and flushed it.

→ WRONG THING TO DO! ←

And I mean….. wayyyyyyyy wrong!
How could a routine cleanup that I had performed about 600 times before, go so wrong?
Well, it went wrong because I usually throw the stuff into the garbage can, not the toilet.
Apparently toilets are designed to carry away a lot of umm….. stuff…. but they are not really made to export half of a cat’s intestinal tract wrapped in a towel!

The water rose. Oh God, it rose and would not stop.
I began to wail, “No, no. Don’t do this to me. What the hell? NOOOOOO!”
I grabbed the toilet plunger and jammed it in there but water and cat-vom were now pouring over the sides of the bowl.
No, no, no, no!” I was now pretty much jumping with all my weight on that plunger. I’m surprised I did not shove it right through the pipes and into the toilet on the 12th floor, beneath me!
“Water! Water everywhere, and not a drop to dri….”
Never mind. There was no time for jokes!

I grabbed a towel, [and a damn good towel it was] from the rack and threw it on the floor. And another one. And the rest of the paper towels.
I kept thrashing away with the plunger while visions of cat-puke seeping through someone’s apartment below me, danced in my head!
Finally, a shift in water level.
Salvation.
Yes, yes, there it goes…. down, down, down. I am nearly giddy for joy! Joy that my toilet works!
And not only works, but works so good!
Because it really went crazy now, like with the way it greedily hauled back on the water there at the very end….. you know what I mean?
After all that wild plunging I guess it sort of hyper-flushed itself!
Like, it was startling the way it gurgled and gurgled angrily, like I mean there was NO water in the toilet now and yet it was still swallowing something. It was like a death rattle. Like my toilet was yelling at me, all garbled like…. “Don’t evvverrr doooo that agaaaiiiiin you idiotttttt…..”

The bathroom was a mess.
Some dang good towels got thrown out.
It took me a while to clean everything up, while Jack casually looked on, occasionally licking his paws, and lightly meowing now and then.
Wondering what all of the fuss was about.

**********

3 comments:

Cold Molasses said...

Sounds very much like my morning Cip (well replace hair ball with peeing mistake and vomit and shaking and panting - an all around miserable doggie day! Oh the joys of pet parenthood.

Anonymous said...

Pet parenthood - a few things attract me less than having an animal around. I am totally indifferent to pets but, on the other hand, I am very fond of children.

Anonymous said...

Oh my. At least you got a good story out of it :)