I'm talking about fleas.
My cats and dog have never had fleas. Molly is eight years old, so that tells you how nice it has been. We have always used the stuff between her shoulder blades that you apply once a month, and we've never had a problem.
We never treated the cats, because they don't go outside, and we figured if Molly, who is the only pet who goes outdoors, was treated, we were safe.
And that was the case, until a few months ago, when Molly had a vet visit.
She'd been home a few hours, when Daughter noticed a 'bug' crawling on Molly's face. It was a flea! Apparently she'd picked it up at the vets.
Not that I'm blaming the vets, they can't control what animals have on 'em when they are in the waiting room. I wish they had a flea alert alarm that would go off, but no.
Anyway, we got the flea off and killed that little sucker, (pun intended) and looked Molly over pretty good and found two more, killed them, and thought that was that.
And it seemed so....until the cats started scratching. Eli was impossible to find anything on him, as he has three layers of fur. Lily looked clean. Mimi is a tortie, so who could see a flea? And Frost, well, he growled and bit, but we held him down. And found fleas galore.
I won't repeat the word I said, but it was reminiscent of my grandmother's choice of words when she was extremely frustrated. See previous blog.
It has entailed an exhausting adventure of taking four (count 'em, four) cats to the vet to have a bath, because the stuff we used from Lowe's worked not at all. But it had to be washed off them completely in order for the stuff that does work to be put on them. Three of the four cats had to be sedated to be bathed. So we had three drunk cats and one somewhat paranoid cat for several hours.
They sure did sleep well that night, though.
We don't have fleas here anymore. The vet has a lot more money than he had last week.
We are broke, the cats are serene, and the vet is rich.
And all it took was one flea - or two.
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