Answer:  They both made it 23 days into the new year with only one ball dropping.

Someday we’ll have two healthy cats around the house. Maybe by next week? That’d be nice. Porter’s back to his old self. He talks, he purrs, he rolls over on his back to beg for belly rubs (feet preferred, but hands are OK).  He does this yoga stretching routine when he gets up and he attacks the scratching posts (and furniture) with much gusto. I guess I never mentioned it here that the vet called and his blood work was fine.  “Perfect” is the word she used, and I’m never going to argue with that. We kept the painkillers going until yesterday and I’m not seeing anything in his behavior that makes me think he still needs them. I did the thing this morning where I dug under the bookcase downstairs with the long spoon to dislodge what’s been put under there.  There was a healthy supply of twist ties.

As a medical device it makes a great cat toy.

Dunkel, on the other hand, got snipped yesterday.  Unfortunately for him, one testes didn’t descend and they had to go into his abdomen to get it. He handled the surgery just fine and the anesthesia didn’t seem to bother him.  There was no throwing up or anything. It wasn’t really obvious until this morning, but he was clearly still pretty doped up when he came home yesterday.  He’s moving around pretty stiffly today, to say the least. He was licking his incision, which was OK, I guess, but he was also biting at it. Carla went back up to the vet’s to get a cone-of-shame which wound up being almost, but not entirely, useless. We have a hard enough time keeping a collar on the little guy. A cone? Not gonna happen. There hasn’t been much of an issue since the drugs wore off.  Porter isn’t the roughhousing type, really. He’s more the “chase me, chase me, chase me” type. Dunkel is sore enough today that getting into a position to bite at the stitches isn’t really something he can do. He’s definitely been slowed down by all this.  He’s walking gingerly and he doesn’t like jumping onto things. Stepping gently is more his speed.  Except he’s managed to get up to the top of the tower. That’s pretty impressive. Sure hope he’ll be able to get down.

I want to make sure I mention that we knew going into this that we’d likely be dealing with this. Typically pets you get from the shelter are already fixed. We knew he wasn’t and why and we were fine with it. We got a voucher to cover what the cost of a typical procedure would cost, which was nice, but we would have taken him anyway.

The cold weather is holding on and I’m looking forward to the day we can just snuggle with our cats rather than running a feline health clinic. Of course, so are they.