*May Trigger*

[castledwellers.livejournal.com]

We had to treat 7 cats for ear mites the other day. Only one tore us up. He tried to remove our hands from our body, but only succeeded in scratching our wrist, above the joint. It looks like a poor suicide attempt... but we can't stop looking at it. The redness of the scab, the way it puckers along the edges. It makes some of us inside want to cut. Its funny that this purely accidental scratch can mean as much to some as a deliberate injury, only it is acceptable because the cat did it. There is a thought that floats around that we antagonized the cat so it would scratch us up...

Speaking of all of this... what was worse was the cat triggered us horribly, and it was all we could do to keep some inside from actually "harming" the cat (that is in quotes because it is a VERY mild word for what we could have done). It is hard to stop the rage that claws its way to the front...
I was appalled at how we reacted! It is hard to explain to people the horrors that we faced/face. It is even more difficult to explain that at any moment it could happen again. I don't think our "coping mechanism" is really one that is no longer needed. We are still very much in danger.

MANDY

Comments

[sethrenn.livejournal.com]

Are you putting drops in their ears? One thing you can do to stop them from struggling and clawing, if they have a tendency to do that, is to basically roll them tightly in a towel before you put the drops in, so that they can't move their arms and legs. You don't have to keep them in it for long, just make sure their head is sticking out of it and it's not so tight they can't breathe.

FYI, it's not required to use trigger warnings/cuts here-- just LJ-cut if your post goes over 30 lines or so.

[coldironkiss.livejournal.com]

Seconding the towel recommendation. Wrap the cat up like a burrito. It might not help with the root problem, but it'll prevent you from feeling like you need to do something drastic to the cat.

-Steve

[ksol1460.livejournal.com]

There is also such a thing as a cat sack (http://www.fourflags.com/FFOA-3.html) which works better for some cats and people. Any petsmart or other pet supply store should have these.

[castledwellers.livejournal.com]

Thank you all for those suggestions. Actually the problem wasn't the ear drops, that was the easy part, because we implimented the towel wrap method... it was the bathing, and from what I undertstand, wrapping a towl around a cat DURING a bath, doesn't really help in actually getting the shampoo on the cat... could be wrong, but I doubt it. The issue was the triggering because of the cat. The slicing of my wrist making many of us want to cut. The sick thought of antagonizing the cat to make it hurt us, if that was the case.