The Day We Cut Christopher Out of the Will.

Unless Christopher starts doing some serious sucking up, Alex will be inheriting 100% of the Wilson family fortune. All my books, our ten-year-old computer, the couch our neighbors put in our family room in lieu of putting it on the curb for garbage pick-up -- it all goes to our oldest son, like the Victorians used to do. And, like the prototypical Victorian second son, Christopher's just going to have to go into the clergy or something. Which, given the way things have been going for the godly these days, may suit his twisted little soul quite nicely.

You may remember the story of Bobby and Cindy Bradycat, and how they came to join our home last Christmas. Since that day, not a week has gone by where the thought has not crossed my mind that maybe we didn't do them any favors. By a cruel twist of fate, they're a three-year-old child's first pet. From the child-education end, our message re: cat care has been consistent with both Christopher and Alex: How to pet them, how to hold them, how to feed and water them, how to play with them.

Over the past four months, we've run into three ongoing problems as far as the lesson plan goes.

1.) "Pet them gently" means "pet them gently every single time" and not "pet them gently twice then squeeze them in a big bear hug until they gasp for air."

2.) Don't play hide and seek with them and then forget where you've hidden them. Or forget that you're playing hide and seek all together and settle down to watch Avatar while somebody's left crying in the toy box.

3.) Remember when I said this? "Don't put Tabasco drops in the water dish!"
Feel free to substitute "Tabasco" for "raw eggs," "pieces of paper," or "anything but water." This is mostly for Alex.

And from the cat-education end, we've pretty much told them to do whatever it takes to get their point across. The on-going problems with this lesson plan are:

1.) Bobby is a total doormat.

2.) So is Cindy.

We decided against having them declawed, partly so they could defend themselves if they ever got outside, but also partly because we thought the kids would treat them better if they had a healthy appreciation for their pointy claws, but no! These cats are masochists. All day, it's squeeze!... Gasp!... Kitty! I love kitty!... Wheeze! Purr! I love you, too!... Squeeze!

I really don't get it. They have our full permission to draw as much blood as it takes to be left alone, but it seems they'd rather curl up around the boys' heads at night and purr like motorized earmuffs.

So it's not too surprising that Steve and I heard Bobby coughing one morning in the next room. I usually ignore one cough from anybody, but his initial cough was followed by a series of hacking barks.

"What's wrong with Bobby?" I called out.

My question was followed by a silence broken only by Bobby's quiet gacking. In my experience, silence = guilt, so I got up to investigate. I was met halfway by Alex, who began frantically trying to tell me what happened. "Telling what happened" is not Alex's strong suit, and it gets much worse when he's under any kind of pressure. In between all the shrieks and hand-flapping, I managed to pick up a couple of words here and there, and the words repeated themselves often enough that I could piece together a basic outline of the story.

"Christopher...Christopher! And I squeezed his tummy! I squeezed his neck! But the nickel was gone! Bobby was choking! I tried to squeeze it out, but it didn't work!"

"Are you trying to tell me Bobby swallowed a nickel?"

"It was Christopher! Christopher did it!"

"Christopher fed the cat a nickel?"

"Yes! So I squeezed his tummy to make it come out! Then I squeezed his neck! But it didn't come out!"

Alex and I went back to the living room. Christopher sat guiltily on the couch. Bobby had retreated to the relative safety of the kitchen, where he was crouched on the floor in the hairball-projectile position. His coughing had ceased, but his face still bore the stress of the encounter.

"Christopher, did you feed the cat a nickel?" I demanded disbelievingly.

"I put a nickel in his mouth," admitted Christopher, "and then he opened his mouth, and the nickel was gone, and I said, 'where'd the nickel go?'"

"And I squeezed his tummy!" shouted Alex.

"Do you mean, like the time when you choked on a peppermint and I gave you the Heimlich maneuver to get it out?"

"Yeah!"

"You gave the cat the Heimlich?"

"Yeah," said Alex modestly, proud that his medical heroism was finally getting acknowledged.

I don't know at this point which child had done more damage, the child that made Bobby swallow a nickel or the child that tried to get the nickel back out.

I left a moderately frantic message for the vet and took him in after I dropped the grubby little brutes off at school. The vet whisked Bobby away for an x-ray as soon as we arrived, leaving me to sit and reflect on what the kids had told me.

A nickel? A nickel seems so big! And Bobby is so small! Are they sure it was a nickel? Coin identification isn't their strongest skill. Maybe they got mixed up and fed him a penny. Or a dime! Yes, a dime. Dimes are small. Not a quarter, definitely not. But a dime wouldn't be that big of a deal. Or maybe they were just pretending or were mistaken. Kids do that. If they were just kidding, I'll be irritated that they wasted my time, but better safe than sorry.

I had just worked my way around to fully buying this theory when the vet walked back into the examining room with Bobby and Bobby's x-ray.



"I'm going to kill them," I said.

One corner of the vet's mouth curled up into a half-smile. "I know how you are feeling right now," he said. "I mean, I understand. But this happens more than you would think."

I knew exactly which conversation the vet and I were about to have, the one where we discuss the various treatment paths we could take, and I tried to avoid it. As far as I was concerned, there was only one viable path.

"What is the best thing we can do for Bobby right now?" I asked. (Besides finding him a better family to live with, that is.)

The vet could not be swayed from protocol, and gave me a couple of no-pressure, non-judgmental options.

Option #1: Do nothing.

"This is what I'd advise you to do if Bobby was a dog," he said. "Dogs eat some crazy stuff. One of my patients ate a sweater."

"Bobby's not a dog," I pointed out, impatient to Fix Bobby Now.

"He might pass it in a day or two."

I looked at him skeptically.

"What are the odds of that happening?"

"There's a possibility..."

"But what will probably happen if I let it go?"

"It will probably get stuck and cause blockage."

"What would you do if it was your kitty?"

Option #2: De-nickeling

"If it was my kitty," he said, "I'd take that nickel out."

"Then that's what we'll do," I said, suavely tossing away our hopes of paying this month's mortgage in favor of a nickel-free cat.

Then we moved onto the topic of scheduling. We tentatively planned for the surgery to go down the following morning. As the veterinary technician was telling me not to feed Bobby after 8:00pm, the vet interjected.

"Has Bobby eaten today?"

"I assume so," I said.

The vet leaned over the technician's shoulder to look at his appointment book. He clucked softly. "I have a vaccination in thirty minutes." He hesitated for only a couple of seconds, but it was enough to know he not only thought Bobby needed surgery, but he needed it before the nickel left Bobby's stomach and entered his intestines.

"What if it isn't in his stomach tomorrow morning?" I asked.

"Then I will find it," he said.

If Bobby had had an empty (except for the nickel!) stomach, the vet would have probably cancelled his next appointment. But in the end, I kept my fingers crossed and brought Bobby back first thing in the morning.

"Can you neuter him, too? While you've got the scalpel out?"

"Sure," said the vet, "I see no reason to put him through two surgeries."

Steve brought a very woozy Bobby home late that afternoon, de-nickeled and de-balled, with a white Elizabethan collar around his neck and a big scar on his shaved belly.

"The vet said the nickel was poised right next to the entry to his intestines," he said. "By the end of the day today, he'd have been screwed."

I showed Christopher, laying the guilt on thick.

"Look at poor Bobby now," I said.

Christopher was teary and repentant. "I'm sorry, Bobby!" he cried, "I'm very sorry!"

Two days later, Bobby returned to Christopher's bed, forgiving all.

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Special pop quiz! Guess which nickel has been floating in the digestive juices of a cat?