Chicken Bones

Last night, at around ten thirty, I was watching Desperate Housewives on my laptop with my boyfriend. We were sitting together on the sofa, using the coffee table as a footrest. On the coffee table was, among many other things, a piece of my quesadilla from dinner. I had meant to finish the food, because it was really delicious, but unfortunately, as I was starting the third out of four pieces, I bit down on a bone in the chicken which killed my appetite. This wasn’t just a little chip of bone back between my molars, oh no. This was a honkin’ hunk’a chicken femur still embedded in the fleshy thigh. So, I left it there on the plate, meaning to throw it away once I was ready to call it a night.

I have a cat named Sadie who many people have said doesn’t actually exist. She is a lovely creature, with black fur and yellow eyes. She’s also wildly shy. Anyway, she was hanging out with us, mostly on the sofa, trying her hardest to unplug the power cable from my computer, and I brushed her off, and scratched the top of her head, which I what I think she really wanted.

Earlier in the evening she had shown a small bit of interest in the plate of food, and my boyfriend had kindly told her, in the gentlest possible way, “Sadie, that isn’t appropriate.” Because she’s an easy going sort of cat, we figured this would be enough.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

Sadie, in a fit of backbone and crazed desire, leapt onto the table and in one swift motion, swallowed the hunk of chicken, bone and all. It took a moment for the incident to sink in.

“Did she eat the one with the bone?” I asked.

“I think so.”

“That quickly?”

“Uh… yeah.”

So, I grabbed the cat, and my boyfriend quickly got the bottle of 3% hydrogen peroxide from the medicine cabinet. The first teaspoon didn’t make her vomit, but it sure made her foam and gag like crazy. The second didn’t work either.

Ten minutes later, the third didn’t.

At this point, I started to panic a little. I mean, now she really had to throw up, because she’d ingested a large amount of what amounts to poison. In a fit of panic, we then made her drink a small glass of warm salt water.

That didn’t work well either.

So, after forty five minutes, I ended up in the bathroom, holding her belly and trying to get her to vomit, but she didn’t want to. Now, I need to interject here and mention that my cat has a problem with hairballs, and vomits almost daily. So, holding her over the tile, massaging her stomach, I realized that her body was trying to throw up, but she was swallowing it back down. I ended up having to hold her head so that she couldn’t work the swallowin’ muscles and massage her stomach at the same time before she finally spewed everything up in one messy cat-vomit mess. And lo, the bone was in one whole piece.