The Earputation

Go to your kitchen cabinet or pantry and pull out a Solo (or store brand plastic) cup. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Now, hold the cup's lip against the wall and slide it along the sheet rock. Then tap the lip against the wall a few times before you rub it on the wall again.

That sound is what I listened to for a couple of hours this afternoon after I brought Clorox home from the vet wearing a plastic party hat around his neck. Some animals refer to it as the Cone of Shame. Clorox had to wear it because today he had his ears removed.

The procedure was not a surprise; in fact we've been expecting it for several years now, ever since our friend and veterinarian Johnny Bembry gave us a subtle hint. He said, "Clorox is going to get skin cancer on his ears, and you're going to have to have them removed."

So we kept our eyes on his ears for five or six years, all the while thinking that as Clorox advanced in age the skin cancer might not be an issue. After all, Clorox seems to have lived more than nine lives with hardly a scar to show for it.

We got Clorox from the Humane Society of Savannah in 1998 when he was only two years old. Someone had tried to call him Jerome. He was so relieved when we rescued him so he could go by a decent name.

Clorox was patient with four year-old Davis and gentle with Lawson when he eventually joined the family.

As gentle as he was with our children, he always considered himself the great white hunter. Many days we'd see Clorox creeping through the marsh grass, his tail swishing as he stalked the lone marsh bunny. It always amazed us that as white as he was he thought he blended in with the surroundings.

As he got older, though, we watched the fur disappear from his ears. Then the tips curled back, the first sign of skin damage. A couple of years later, we noticed the scabs, and we thought, Uh-oh. Here's the skin cancer. But then the scabs would drop off, and the ear would heal, leaving us to think that the lesions were the result of a midnight fight.

Still confident in Clorox's health, Stephen set out to train him to take his dirty clothes to the laundry room. Clorox never carried anything heavier than a tee shirt, and he never got it farther than the kitchen, but I really think the trouble was Stephen's instructional strategy, not Clorox's ability to tote clothes. Come to think of it, if anybody threw a dirty red tee shirt on my head, I wouldn't be too keen to play along either.

Clorox was even patient when we decided to try America's short-lived favorite pastime, cat breading:

His ears were too big, though, so the slice of break always broke open. 

Last summer, Clorox came upstairs looking kind of puny, and I noticed he couldn't even hop up on the toilet bowl for a refreshing drink. After helping him, I put him on the rug in my room, where he lay still all afternoon. This is it, we thought. He's sixteen years old, and it's finally his time. 

But then after a couple of days he was all better. Turns out he just had the flu.

And then the scabs on his ears stopped falling off. Instead, the scabbing spread across the hood of his ear until it got so crusty that Clorox would get annoyed with it and scratch it off, leaving a raw patch until the scab cycle started over. But the lesions never gave him any pain. In fact, it might have helped camouflage him during his hunting expeditions:

 But eventually, the lesions couldn't be ignored. Johnny's prediction was right. Clorox's ear was not only pretty hard to look at, but it smelled also. We took Clorox to our local vet, Karen Kane, who diagnosed him with squamous cell carcinoma (see the red circle). She also noted that his cancer-free ear was damaged enough that cancer was imminent (see the blue circle).

So she did the surgery and kept him overnight, and I think she showed him a little preferential treatment because even though he had a semiprivate room, he was the only one in it. He also got to eat the extra special wet cat food. But he couldn't avoid the cone of shame. 

Clorox has a tendency to rub his head on every corner he walks by, and Karen didn't want him rupturing his sutures. So for a couple of hours, we listened to the sound of a plastic cub bumping against the walls, the stairs, and the floors. Then during dinner, we noticed the house had gone quiet.

"Where's Clorox?" I asked.

He has to be around here somewhere, "Stephen replied. "

"But I don't hear anything," I persisted.

Lawson got up to inspect. He found the cone of shame sitting on the bottom step, abandoned. Lawson found Clorox upstairs asleep atop Davis's clothes. He was much more comfortable without all that plastic around his neck.

So we'll just have to keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't pop his stitches. But I can tell we're already getting on his nerves. Maybe I should stop following him around with my camera. But I can't help it. He just looks so weird earless.

But maybe now we can fit a slice of bread on his head.