The story of Three Irish Girls… a fairly tale. Chapter eleven.
Friday, April 3, 2009 at 4:58AM “We’re almost there, Isabel, hold on,” the girl crooned to the white cat in her lap. Isabel, her little white paw cocooned in a red bandana, mewed pitifully. “I think the bleeding has almost stopped,” the girl remarked to her husband.
Isabel had always been a nervous cat, prone to anxiety and overly neurotic behaviors. Her belly, once covered in soft white fur, was now licked bald, exposing the pink skin beneath. Anti-anxiety medication hadn’t controlled Isabel’s obsessive licking of everything. Plastic bags. Heating registers. Obviously, her rotund belly. The girl mentally added obsessive scratching to the list of Isabel’s oddities.
Several hours earlier, the girl heard hissing and the reeeeoooooooowing sound of an angry cat, and turned around from her seat to see Isabel and their two year old cat, Kia, about to engage in fisticuffs. Kia, younger and more aggressive, liked to taunt Isabel about her insecurities. “Look at your bald belly,” the girl imagined Kia saying. “Do you have any sandpaper left on your tongue, or did they all get scraped off when you licked the heating register for three hours last night?”
As all bullies are, Kia was herself insecure and scared of vulnerability. She had a dense coat of charcoal gray fur and green eyes. She so steadfastly refused to lay on her back and expose her belly that her owners didn’t discover the thatch of white fur on her tummy until she was nearly a year old.
Before the fight could move into full-on fur flying mode, the girl twisted in her seat, picked up Isabel, and shoved her into the nearest cat carrier, finding a separate carrier for Kia. She draped towels over the carriers so Kia and Isabel couldn’t see each other, hoping to calm them down.
Kia accepted her confinement. It was almost as if she were saying, “Hey, I’m fine with this carrier. I’m just going to take a nice long nap over here while White Cat over there makes a fool of herself. Oh, wait, what’s this all over my belly? Is it fur? Hey Isabel, check out the fur on my tummy!”
Isabel was distraught -- being in the carrier compounded her anxieties, and she scratched determinedly at the door. Certain that if she just scratched long enough, the girl would have to let her out, Isabel remained steadfast in her determination.
“Have I mentioned that I’m catted out? Like, ever, at any time, ever, ever?” the girl asked her husband. No amount of Tommy James and Shondells could drown out Isabel’s scratching and meowing. No amount of Gordon Lightfoot or John Denver had the remotest effect. “Have I mentioned that you have very limited taste in music?” the girl asked her husband. “Like ever, at any time?” After 726 minutes of obsessive door scratching and 1970s music, Isabel’s plaintive mews turned into wails.
The girl turned to see blood spatters on the back passenger door. “Pull over,” the girl instructed. “Isabel is bleeding!” She gingerly removed Isabel from her carrier. Isabel was secretly pleased that her plan had finally succeeded. If it took scratching so hard that her claws came out, then so be it. The girl noticed the blood stains on Isabel’s paw. “It looks like she cut her paw somehow.” The girl’s husband gently squeezed Isabel’s paw to extrude her claws.
“Two of her claws are gone,” he said. Isabel tried to bite his hand. He picked her up and held her firmly to his chest. He spoke in a low, gentle tone. “Isabel, listen to me. We are going to help make your paw feel better. But this is enough. You cannot scratch or bite anymore. You have to stop. We want to help you, but you have to cooperate.” Isabel relaxed, safe in the arms of the cat whisperer. “Your mama is going to hold you, and we are going to get someone to help you, but you have to try and go to sleep now.”
Her husband opened the driver’s door. “Where are you going?” the girl asked. “To talk to Gray Badness back here.” He deftly swung the back door open, lifted Kia’s carrier out, and shut the door before any of the other cats had time to escape. He stood outside, the carrier up to his face. The girl could hear everything he was saying through the door. “Kia! I have had enough of this. You cannot fool me, I know exactly what you’re trying to do here. You don’t have to pick on Isabel to make yourself seem better! We will always love you, even if you show signs of weakness or vulnerability. This has to stop. You cannot hurt Isabel anymore.”
The girl stroked Isabel’s back and stared out her window. She wondered how she got here, stuck in a car in the middle of Nowhere, Missouri, with four cats and a husband lecturing an animal about emotional vulnerability six feet away.
“No more, Kia, no more,” she heard him say as he swung the door open once again, replacing her carrier in the back seat. “How is Isabelly?” he asked.
“I think the bleeding has stopped,” the girl answered. “What should we do?” she asked. “We can’t drive all the way to DC with fighting, bleeding cats.”
“We’re going to have to get her to a vet a few hours south of here,” he responded, consulting the map.
“What is this, a made for TV movie?” the girl asked. You just happen to know a vet a few hours south of Nowhere?”
“It’s not Nowhere, I know exactly where we are. And the vet lives in my mom’s hometown. I bet if I call her and ask her to call the vet, he’ll come in to the office on a Sunday night.”
The motley crew veered off course, headed for medical care. En route, the car grew progressively hotter. The 100 degree temperature outside made the lack of air conditioning more noticeable. The girl aimed the vents directly on her face. Hot air is better than no air, she thought, wishing that there was such a thing as a teleport so that this journey could end more quickly.
“We’re going to have to get the air conditioning looked at,” her husband said. “There’s no way we can finish this trip without it.” They determined that they would have to stop for a day in the small town where they were headed – Isabel needed tending, and now the car needed help as well.
Dr. Ingersoll should have been retired, by all accounts. But he kindly came in to his office on a Sunday night to look at the injured cat of two wayward travelers. “Two of her claws are gone,” he pronounced. “And she’ll probably keep going until all of them are gone, by the way you’ve described her. I’m going to give her some sedatives.”
“Sedatives don’t work on her,” the girl said sadly. “Our other vet gave us two to try, and both made her even more crazy.”
“Hmmm…” said Dr. Ingersoll, lost in thought. “Unfortunately, one of the side effects of sedatives can be anxiety and hyperactivity, so it doesn’t appear that she reacted well to them.”
“No, not at all. It turned her into some kind of demon cat,” the girl said.
“There are more powerful sedatives, but they require injections, and I don’t feel comfortable having you administer them outside of a supervised medical setting. Why doesn’t Isabel stay here tonight? We’ll help her get some rest. While she’s sedated, we’ll clean and bandage her paws, and then you can pick her up tomorrow. I would suggest keeping her front paws bandaged for the remainder of the trip so you can limit infection, and if she does scratch, she won’t be scratching her claws out.”
Three days later, the car was fixed, Isabel was healing, and the couple was hopelessly behind schedule. They had to make it to their new home before the movers did, and the rest of their journey was hurried. They didn’t languish on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The mountains of West Virginia were lovely, but passed by in a blur.
The sign could not have been better. “Maryland Welcomes You. Founded 1634.” The girl felt like she could finally exhale – home was now only a few hours away.
Editor's note: As this chapter is published, Isabel is frantically licking a plastic shopping bag under the Yarnista's desk. The shopping bag is being reused as a trash can liner, which makes her like it all the more.
Chit Chat 
