Thursday thirteen (on Friday)... dirtiest story #1

Of course the first story that popped into my head involved poop. We aren’t talking run of the mill, oops the diaper overflowed a bit poop – we are talking – ‘Dear G-d, where did all of this come from, this child isn’t that large. – let me set the scene –

We were early married, and broke, and we had an 18 month old daughter and a 3 month old son and a cat that would not stop getting urinary tract infections. (ps. just as an added stinky note, male cats with urinary tract infections are stinky independent of anything else going on!) So the day arrives that the cat is miserable and cannot pee, he is groaning and moaning and spraying (ugh what a stink) this crystallized bloody nasty foul smelling stuff all over my dirty laundry – well actually he generally preferred for whatever reason to spray husband’s laundry, but I still had to deal with the mess. Our truck isn’t running, so husband has taken the only running vehicle to work, in another town, pretty far from home, and I have no way of taking poor little miserable cat to the vet (which I can’t really afford to pay for, but when we have pets we have a responsibility). I call my mom, and she was flat out nasty to me, I don’t know to this day why she was so reluctant to be helpful, because that is the complete opposite of the norm. I call the husband, can he get off early, etc… it ain’t happening. My best friend, who has an 8-5 job, that she can’t ordinarily get off from happens to call me, I am in tears, no one will help me get my poor miserable cat to the Dr. and my two babies are making me crazed. She happened to have the day off, she drives right over – she loves my children, she loves my cat (in spite of an allergy) and most of all she loves me. We load both the darlings’ car seats into her small little Dodge Colt. The car seats fill up the entire backseat – but this wonderous car is a hatchback – oh yeah, I said hatchback – shhhhh don’t tell anyone that I was in a hatchback. We load the poor miserable cat into the cat carrier and put it in the back of the car. Then we load the darlings – who are in a wonderful mood – Auntie B has come to visit and they get an ‘outing’ what more fun could a person have. Now we lived in a small town (Golden, Colorado) and the vet was in our town, so not more than 15 minutes away. However, Grunt (the cat, why I named him that is another day’s story) hates the car, hates the cat carrier, does’t feel real good anyhow, and is generally an ass when he’s not getting his way… so he shits himself (and the cat carrier), well let’s be honest, he projectile shit all over the carrier which then got all over him… wet nasty cat diarrhea dripping off of the cat carrier onto his fat hairy body, and it did manage also to project out of the slats of the carrier with enough velocity to create some sort of splatter pattern on the hatchback window that Crime Scene Investigators would have to comment on. He also managed to pop off a little squirt or two or ten of cat spray… so now the car, in the summer heat, smells like cat shit, some sort of strange musky skunky piss odor and my darling 3 month old son begins to giggle and laugh. We arrive at the vet moments later, literally not more than 3 minutes – I go for the cat, because my friend who loves my cat is gagging hideously and well who would want anyone else to deal with that mess for you. She sweetly offers to take her time getting the kids out of the car and into the stroller and into the vet because we will have to wait for the appointment anyhow (and oh yeah, who wants to be around smelly cat)… I carry the dripping mess of cat and cat carrier to the back door of the vet’s office and gingerly set it on the sidewalk in the shade to go in and explain that they don’t want me in their lobby with ‘that’. The girl says “oh that happens all the time, just bring him on in”… apparently I did a poor job of communicating just how awful it was, because I cleared the waiting room in seconds and we were shown to an exam room with much haste where a tech joined us to begin assisting in the hideous clean up. I confess, in a moment of selfish confusion or intense maternal instinct – I left the tech to deal with the cat and went outside to check on my children. That’s when I discovered that the cat had NOTHING on my son… the giggles that followed the cat explosion could only have been some sort of sick male pride thing. Remember this was the 90’s – car seats were huge hulking buckets that could probably hold somewhere around a gallon of liquid… my son filled his car seat to overflowing, it was running out his neck, it was running out of his shoes, it was all over the car seat, and running out of that onto the seats of my friends car (my childless friend)… it was on the floor of the car – it was that seedy weird baby diarrhea that won’t wipe off of anything, you just chase it around… and it stunk – you would have thought that I had killed the cat and served him to my son to make such a stinky BM. And, I was broke and frugal (read cheap), so I had brought about three torn in half baby wipes in my small little diaper bag baby wipe container. My friend was using those crappy brown paper towels (you know the ones they have in school that absorb NOTHING) trying to make a dent in the flood of brown goo that just kept spreading out and coming from places that made no sense at all. My daughter was in the stroller in the shade of a tree, my son was lying on what used to be a small white receiving blanket that I usually used under the changing pad in the same shade still fully dressed and fascinated by some bits of poo that were on his fingers – I took to the kid with a few of the towels, it was useless, I grabbed a bag and threw all of his clothes in it and tied it shut. I took my naked child inside and asked if I could please just hose him off in a sink – the receptionist freaked out of course, who would put their child in a veterinarian’s wash sink????... my friend continued singing to my daughter while she gagged and puked and attempted to get the car back to at least drivable so we could go home. The vet tried to give the cat back, I refused, I told him these infections were chronic, I was sure he was dehydrated and needed IV fluids and could I please just leave him til my husband could pick him up after work. We lined the car seat with newspaper, put the near naked (I did have a clean diaper left) child back in, and went home with all the windows down. My friend pretty much just dumped me on my doorstep mumbling something about hosing out her car and I went inside with my children and cried again!

When she sold that car about a year later it still smelled like the day from hell… and yet someone paid her $500 for the car – she was delighted to be rid of it.