*sigh* Cats.

On Monday night, Tabitha peed in the hallway. There is no litter box in the hallway; she chose to go there nonetheless.

The last time this happened, it heralded a urinary infection, crystalline and painful, though I didn’t figure this out until she’d done the same thing twice more in other places. “Oh,” I finally thought when the frustrated screaming had died down. “There must be something wrong with her.”

I would not be caught out again. I called the vet and made an appointment for the next day and in the meantime, she spent the night in the bathroom with one litter box, food, water, and a cozy kitty bed.

Tuesday evening I took her in, having been unable to procure the necessary urine sample. They poked and prodded her while she tried to bore her way through my abdomen to hide. Then they tried to get a sample…from what I understand this involves squeezing and manipulating and none of it sounds like a good time. Tabitha was more than a match for these efforts, though, and there was no joy. “We’ll have to keep her overnight,” they said, “and you can pick her up tomorrow after she leaves a sample.”

I took the cat carrier and trundled off to home, confident that this would be solved. It must be solved, you see, because I’m flying to Savannah for a week in a few days and poor catsitting Holly doesn’t want to clean up cat pee. Administering medicine is bad enough.

Hamlet and I spent a quiet evening, just the two of us. Occasionally he would look around for Tabitha, look somewhat confused, and then shrug his linebacker shoulders and come purring back to curl up at – or rather, on my feet.

Wednesday I called the vet at lunch to make sure I could pick Tabitha up. “No luck yet,” they informed me. “She’s being a bit stubborn.” No problem. I called back at 5, at which point she’d been at the vet for about 24 hours.

“Still no pee,” they said.

“How about I come get her and some of that fancy plastic litter and see if I can get a sample at home like I did last year?” I suggested.

We had an agreement and the carrier and I went back to the vet to take my poor, beleaguered kitter home. Apparently, she was very unhappy there: they wanted me to go back and get her myself because they didn’t want her to bite them. I looked incredulously at them, but when I got back to the cage, she was twice her normal size and had somehow fastened herself to its metal floor in the back corner.

And at once I saw the problem of her not peeing – the “litter box” they’d placed in there was half a Styrofoam take-out container with a tiny mound of plastic NoSorb litter in it. She’s apparently tipped it over more than once. How is that supposed to bear any resemblance to her litter box, and if she did figure it out and tried to use it, how was it supposed to stay upright?

At any rate, I stuck my hand in, she growled at it, I held out a finger, she sniffed it and then let me lift her out into the waiting carrier. I paid, we went home (during which trip she licked my finger repeatedly), and I set up the pee-gathering litter box, shut the bathroom door, and let her out.

First she scarfed down the food left in the dish, with frequent time outs to come rub up against my legs, meow, or sniff at the litter box. And as soon as her hunger was sated, she jumped into the litter box and peed like Austin Powers when he wakes from his cryogenic sleep. Oh, so happy kitty! The entire process took about 7 minutes.

Off I went, back to the vet’s office armed with a jar of something I really hope doesn’t spill in my car. I went in and asked brightly, “Would you like some cat urine?” The look on the receptionist’s face said, “I’d rather have syphilis,” but she took it and sent it into the back for the long-awaited urinalysis.

The results came in about fifteen minutes later.

Tabitha is fine.

“Oh,” they said knowingly. “So it was behavioral.”

“Argh!” I said.

“Yes,” they said. “Now, how many litter boxes do you have?”

“Two,” I answered, knowing that they would next say—

“We’d really recommend you get another, since you have two cats. One more litter box than you have cats is a good rule,” they said, just as I knew they would.

“Yes,” I said. “I know. But as there’s no good place to put another, I scoop the boxes about four times a day.”

“Oh,” they said. “Oh. Well. Yes, that sounds sufficient. Hmm.”

“Exactly,” I said.

I went home, let Tabitha out of the bathroom finally, and she commenced being very peeved that I’d shut her in when she thought she was finally free. No, she did NOT want to cuddle. She would rather lay here in the middle of the floor and glare pointedly, in fact.

And I also discovered that Hamlet was apparently not, as I thought, missing Tabitha the night before, but instead checking to make sure she’d really gone and it wasn’t wishful thinking. On her return, he immediately set about bullying her, following her around and smacking at her. He had apparently been saying, “Thank heavens! You finally got rid of her!”

*sigh*

Cats.