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By Whistler P. McManus
I have to give credit to my wife, the lovely E.J. McManus, for the topic. Last night I was lamenting my impending failure to complete the Five Articles in Five Days challenge. She was diapering the baby, charting her nursing visits for the day, making our son's lunch to take to school today and doing a load of laundry, and she still managed to empathize with me and start throwing out suggestions.
"Why don't you write the story about the time the cat ate the condom?"
And so, without further ado:
I don't particularly like cats. And I've had, I think, five of them over the course of my adult life. They're filthy creatures, selfish, cruel and aloof. They shred your belongings, indiscriminately vomit up things that are barely distinguishable from their feces and have no respect for your need to sleep. And they lack the charming stupidity that makes a dog such a loyal and loveable companion.
Yeah, I want that in my house.
And a couple of these spread around, too.
Once, though, I loved a cat. Her name was Peggy. Well, it was Margaret Susan McNeill, to be exact, but we called her Peggy.
Before she went to nursing school, E.J. was a veterinary technician. She worked at a busy animal hospital in a very nice neighborhood in downtown Manhattan. Fairly often, someone brought in an injured stray or wild animal that they had found in their travels, and the vets there patched it up. So there were often a couple of strays in cages, recuperating and looking for new homes.
So it was with Miss Peggy. She was just a kitten, but probably born on the street to a stray. Someone found her with a badly mangled and infected leg and brought her in. The doctors operated on her, pinning the broken bones of the leg, but the infection was too far gone, and gangrene set in. The leg (her back left one) had to be removed.
My wife took pity on this poor kitten, who, it seemed, had never been handled by humans. The cat sat in the back of her cage, hissing and spitting even at those who fed and cleaned up after her. She begged me to let her bring the cat home, and I relented.
Somehow, once she was installed in our apartment, I started to like this cat. It was obvious that she needed to be socialized if we were ever going to all live in peace, and so I started to force her to accept being held and carried. Force is the operative word here. She fought against it like, well, like a wildcat. Despite her claws and teeth, she was, after all, just a kitten, and a newly handicapped one at that, and I prevailed. While she never exactly became outgoing, she eventually began to allow people to pet her, and stopped trying to skin every creature that came within a yard.
She also became surprisingly agile. Her missing leg was obvious when she walked, but for some reason she could run without a trace of hindrance from it. She fought our other cats and our dog into submission by sitting back and balancing with her tail, and swatting out like a prizefighter. In short, she became ruler of the roost.
One day, while we were out, she found some string. By the time we became aware of it, there was string coming out both ends of her. This is a potentially life threatening situation, because the string can strangle off the intestines or something. (What do I know? I'm not the nurse.) So she had to go in for surgery. It was a lucky thing for us that E.J. worked there, because I'm sure it would have been more than we could have afforded to perform this surgery. This I learned firsthand, because I watched the procedure.
 
Have you ever had the drawstring come out of a pair of swim trunks? Then had to feed it back through that hole, inch by inch? Imagine doing that in reverse, only the swim trunks are wet and slippery. Basically, the doc cut a hole in Peggy's abdomen and took everything out, then began this tedious procedure. After what seemed like forever, he was able to tug the last couple of inches out of her poop chute. Then he unceremoniously stuffed all her insides back inside her.
This was her fourth surgery (that I know of) including the leg repair, the leg removal and her spay. So we were really hoping to avoid a fifth one, and not just avoid embarrassment, when we put this poor creature through her next ordeal.
I used to drink a little in those days, and E.J. drank a little more than she does now, so we may have been slightly under the influence when this happened. I don't remember for sure, but it's not unlikely. I say this because we're not usually slobs, and we usually clean up after ourselves, but on this particular night, post coitus, someone took off a condom and dropped it on the floor and went to sleep.
The next thing I knew, E.J. was shaking me, waking me up, and in a panic.
"Did you leave the rubber on the floor?"
"I don't know."
"PEGGY ATE IT!"
And there was Peggy, looking like she was trying to hark up the world's biggest hairball.
Want to hear something gross? That thing actually came out of a human stomach.
"Jim, if it doesn't come up, she's going to need surgery. It will cause an intestinal blockage."
Well, it didn't come up. On its own. And Peggy stopped trying to expel it.
I had seen that cat's intestines, and I was pretty sure there was no way that thing was going to pass through them. And E.J. was too mortified to take her to the vet. We had become very friendly with him, and his wife, to the point that we were having meals with them on weekends, going to movies together and even babysitting their kids (we hadn't had any of our own yet). And she didn't want him to know, well, I'm not sure exactly what, but I'll guess she didn't want him to know we left a used rubber on the floor where one of our cats could (and did) eat it.
She decided we should try to induce vomiting. The only emetic we had in the house was peroxide, but we didn't know the correct dosage, and this was before the internet was available to help you out with such things. So we figure we would give a little bit at a time, wait a while, and if the vomiting didn't start, give a little more.
Sure enough, after a few doses, the cat began to spew and the offending object came up. For a few minutes, it felt like victory. Then we realized that the cat was still vomiting. Peggy vomited until there was nothing left in her to vomit up, and then she vomited some more. Finally, we had to admit that we'd Frosted up, and that we'd better get her to the vet before she died on us.
We packed the girl in her carrier and went off to see our friend, but in all the excitement, we forgot to discuss what we were going to tell him about the circumstances surrounding the situation.
Once we got there, we told him that we had been trying to induce vomiting with peroxide and had probably gone overboard.
"Why were you trying to induce vomiting?" he asked.
I spoke up, "She ate a rubber."
"BAND," E.J. interrupted. "She ate a rubber band."
I'm not sure he believed it, but, being a professional, he fixed her up with some proper medication and sent us on our way.
And that, my friends, is the tale of the cat that ate the condom.
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