As most of you know, I am pretty obsessed with my cat. I love her almost as much as I love Luke and can easily spend all day snuggling her.

She has had many issued in the past with allergies causing her to become congested, sick, get hot spots, itchy, etc. For a while she has been fine with minor flare ups that usually go away on their own. Recently she has had a flare up of her allergies that caused a massive skin reaction. The poor thing is so itchy that she is scratching and licking constantly. We put the cone on her but even time wasn’t helping. She has multiple scabs, sores, and bald spots.

We took the trip to the vet yesterday to get her checked out. The vet confirmed that it’s not fleas and most likely an allergy. This means I am yet again changing her food. This poor cat has had to change food so many times. We had finally found a limited ingredient venison food she could tolerate but then this flare up happened. As it turns out, we can longer order her venison food anyway so we had to change it regardless. Here’s to hoping the Blue Buffalo grain free Rabbit flavor will do the trick. No more fishies or chicken bits from Mommas plate though.

In addition to changing her food, the vet gave her an antibiotic injection, has her on a steroid taper, and gave us a shampoo to help calm her skin and prevent an infection from happening. Here is where her adventures begin.

So we got home and prepared to wash our kitty. How in the world were we going to do this?! I put the shampoo on a face cloth and spot cleaned all of her sores. Luke and I were looking at her thinking, how are we going to rinse her off. I just want to emphasize that this next part was all Luke’s idea.

“Let’s just stick her in the tub and hose her down”

Keep in mind that she is a cat. She doesn’t like it when a drop of water falls on her back.

So off we go carrying an already upset cat to the noisy tub. I put on some rubber gloves, Luke holds onto the hose, and the torture starts. Penny begins screaming and thrashing around. It took all my strength to safely hold her in the tub. Luke got in a quick blast of water, enough to rinse out the shampoo, but the trauma was done. Penny was a drowned rat and so upset.

Next we needed to dry her. The vet told us to make sure she was thoroughly dried as when a cats fur is wet, it can irritate the skin (which we were trying to prevent). We tried drying her with towels but she was so wet that it seemed impossible. So I wrapped her up, carried her back to the bathroom and pulled out the blow dryer. While this wasn’t as bad as the water she still did not like it and I had to follow her around the bathroom with it. I got her dry enough and then sat with her and brushed her until she was calm, dry, and happy.

My poor Penny. Yesterday was not her day. Today we had to do it all over again but this time we had learned our lesson. Instead of taking her in the shower I merely used a wet face cloth to wipe off the shampoo. I still had to use the blow dryer but for much less time. Now she is curled up with me happy being brushed. I’m already noticing a difference from the treatment. She is less itchy and her fur is softer and skin seems less dry. Hoping this is all worth it.

We didn’t get any pics or videos of yesterday’s disaster, but here are some from today’s slightly less traumatizing adventure.