Baubles the Cat

Baubles the Cat in a favourite location.

I’ve mentioned Baubles the Cat a lot but I haven’t actually ever written about her in detail. So this is The Obligatory Post About My Cat. Her name, as you know, is Baubles. We also call her Goose (from that silly song Bubble Goose with the South Park kids, remember it?), Baubie, Beebo, and Scooby. She answers to all these names. I originally named her Hebe, but her name changed over the years – from Hebe to Heebie Jeebie to Heebles to Baubles.

Baubles the Cat is about 16 years old. She is of no particular breed, but she could be described as a domestic long haired cat. Her grey and white colouring sometimes reminds me of a a cow‘s markings. She came from a pet shop – a couple of friends gave her to me as a birthday present when she was a wee kitten. I don’t have any pictures of her as a kitten, but I do remember she was extremely cute, as only tiny balls of fluff can be. (My Mum said she could feature on a greeting card, she was that cute!)

People meeting Baubles the Cat for the first time sometimes ask if she is a Manx cat. This is because she has a tiny stump of a tail. Baubles used to have a long fluffy grey tail with a white tip, but some years ago, she was run over by a car. She lost her tail as a result of the accident. I don’t know exactly what happened, but she dragged herself home one awful Friday morning, panting, and unable to stand. Mum and I rushed her to the vet. Her injuries were bad – she had a crushed pelvis, and she had to be sedated and treated for shock before they could operate. I remember I was working for M’s Dad on the Saturday after the accident, and I was a wreck. I was anxious and distracted and waiting all day for 3:30pm, when I could call the vet to see how the op went. The operation went well – they reset her pelvis, and some days later she pooed, which showed that they had done it properly (after the operation the vet had warned me that if she couldn’t poo they would have to reset her pelvis again).

Portrait courtesy of The Food Pornographer

Before she came home from the vet’s, I had to make sure there was a small enclosed area at home where she could rest, so that she didn’t hurt herself again. Some friends and I drove around the city at night until we found a large wooden packing crate, and we “borrowed” it for Baubles. We lined it with old t-shirts and newspapers and she lived in it for almost 3 months while her pelvis and other injuries healed.

After the operation she still had her tail, because the main injury was to her pelvis and not to her spine. But she was so badly bruised around her lower back, and on her tail, that all the skin died. The skin on her back mostly recovered, although to this day she still has some bald patches on her back where the fur just never grew back. The skin on her tail on the other hand, didn’t recover. It became a crusty loathsome thing that encircled the tail and weighed it down, so that even as her pelvis healed, Baubles became more and more depressed because she had this dead weight dragging her down everytime she tried to move. She was so miserable she refused to move around or do much even though most of her injuries had healed by this time.

The vet sent us to a skin specialist (did you know they have veterinary skin specialists?) who suggested that Baubles would need skin grafts to heal the skin on her tail. He was very keen to do the op, which, according to him, had a 60% chance of succeeding. The skin grafts also meant that we would have to go to the vet’s every two days for at least a fortnight for the dressings to be changed! Now, by this stage Baubles had developed a pathological hatred of vets, so having to take her there so frequently and for so long was not a simple matter. (To this day going to the vet’s is traumatising for her, for her humans, and most of all for her vet, who blanches everytime we take her in.) After much agonising, I decided not to put Baubles through the skin grafts, but to have the tail amputated. The change in her mood was immediate when she came home minus tail – she went back to normal again, she was no longer depressed! So that is how Baubles lost her tail. Her little stump of a tail is every bit as expressive as her long tail used to be – despite its lack of length she has absolutely no problems conveying her displeasure using that tail.

Baubles and me.

Baubles the Cat can be very grumpy. She knows M is The Boss Around the House, and wishes CW would feed her more often. Baubles the Cat should not be left alone with young children, as she does not like or trust them. She doesn’t much care for other cats, and finds dogs annoying, but they don’t scare her – she once told a Dobermann to get out of her house. He got.

This post has been waiting around in draft form for some weeks now. I found it strangely difficult to write about Baubles the Cat!

Categories: Baubles, cat