Phoebe eats about everything she finds that will fit in her mouth. If it is on the floor and should be swept up, chances are good that our little feline Roomba will eat it before it can be thrown away.
This is particularly disconcerting while Ben is in the middle of home improvement projects like drywall repair, paint removal, and fiberglass anything.
On Friday, Ben cut a hole in a wall upstairs so he could crawl through it to put a hole in the floorboard to prepare for ductwork related to installing a new bathroom fan. He also removed some ductwork that was rendered useless after we had a new furnace installed that separated the upstairs into two HVAC zones.
He made sure that the door was closed to the room where the hole was cut so that none of the cats would wander in. Well, Phoebe found a way to endanger herself regardless.
The old ductwork led to a vent in the upstairs bedroom, where the the door was not closed because it was in the process of being replaced. Phoebe managed to pull the vent cover away from the hole and crawled into the fiberglass-laden area with a dangerously big gaping hole in floor, plus a myriad of other dangers to a pet who tastes and/or eats everything not bolted down.
We’re not sure how long she was up there, but Ben noticed the vent pulled off and heard a mew… it didn’t take too long to coerce her out safely, but still. This is an area in which Ben wore a ventilating mask without me asking him to… fiberglass in the lungs being something that we agree is plain awful, and not a symbol of manhood like fiberglass in the hands.
I wiped her down with a wet washcloth after Ben pulled her out, and she was apparently fine after that. With the exception of her crying for the entirety of Sunday morning and into the afternoon that worried me greatly. We’ve already determined that she has anxiety problems (and they even make kitty Zoloft for that, but we haven’t gone to a kitty psychologist yet) so the crying could be from a number of things: general anxiety from a closed bedroom door that had been open, a toy mouse left upstairs that she wanted, fiberglass in the lungs, fiberglass in the digestive system, or who knows. The last two obviously being of the most concern.
She finally stopped crying after we opened the (now replaced) bedroom door. We watched as she ran directly to the (now replaced and blocked with a paint can) vent cover that she had pulled off before. She tried everything in her kitty power to pull it off again, and it was interesting to watch. Luckily she didn’t suspect that it was one of us who put that paint can there. She finally gave up and, having mildly satisfied her curiosty/anxieties (OMG did I close that vent cover after going in I can’t remember maybe I need to go back up there and double check and OMG did I pace back and forth and taste every bit of loose fiberglass I could find, etc.) and was quiet after that.
WEAK STOMACHS DO NOT READ. Later on, she exploded some of her insides politely within the litter box. The smell was anything but polite, so she must have gotten into something up there. Early Monday morning, around 4am, she started hacking up a hairball/fiberglassball, which if you’ve ever been jolted awake to that sound you know how pleasant it is. But nothing actually came out. It just sounded like we were going to have to watch her die slowly and painfully as her insides expanded like a pigeon that ate dry rice and whatever was inside blocked her esophogus and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.
Luckily it didn’t come to that and she’s been her perky, anxious, Roomba self after that. She’ll still cry like she’s stuck in a bear trap once in a while, which we’re good at ignoring nowadays. But LOOK at that face. When we pick her up while she’s crying, she starts purring like a rattly, well-loved old car and everything is forgiven. And isn’t that what love is all about?
