Having JoJo is like having a toddler. I need to JoJo proof everything because he is so curious. He will poke his nose into closets and spaces he does not belong. He has to check out everything he comes across with a sniff and examination. But worst of all, JoJo does not have a discerning palate. He will eat or try to eat most anything he comes across. He will sniff it and then bite into it. Right now he is very busy chewing apart a kicker toy tearing a hole in the cloth cover and pulling out the stuffing. He tries to chew it then spits it out realizing it does not taste right. Then he moves on to the fallen leaf, the crumb from last night’s dinner or a random spider. Chomp, chew and swallow. A couple of bites and it is gone.
But this one was alarming. I was playing with JoJo with a teaser toy. A teaser toy is a stick with a string attached and then a toy attached to the string. Cats will chase them for hours if you are willing to waste your time amusing a cat.
I put the toy down and turned my back for a minute, when I turned back, I found the stick with nothing but a stub of string. The toy that had been attached to the string was also loose seeming to have been chewed off from the string. Missing was the string itself. I searched everywhere. I could not find it.
I asked him, did you eat the string? He did not answer. If he ate the string, he sure did not show any distress. The bigger worry was that it could become lodged in his intestines and cause a blockage. That would kill him. The only way to know would be a trip to the emergency vet. So off we went.
JoJo howls like a banshee when he is in the car. He sits in his carrier and cries. After a while he starts to claw the bottom hoping to escape by digging his way out. The emergency vet is 45 minutes away in rush hour. I had to listen to him howl the whole way. He was showing no signs of being sick.
The vet did an exam and took x-rays. She could not see anything. She tried to induce vomiting. He did not vomit. Finally, we agreed we would wait until he either passed the string or he started to show signs of distress. Six hundred dollars later we went home. I still have not found that string, he has not passed it and he seems just fine. Who knows what happened?
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