Last night I mentioned a bit of an emergency with one of our babies and a late evening jaunt to the vet. A brand new vet, mind you. Fortunately, the new vet is right up the street (location couldn't be better) and seems to be very nice. Plus, he could see my poor traumatized baby at 7:40 last night instead of making us wait till the morning.

Note: Kitty diarrhea is not fun.

She's doing much better this morning. The vet shaved her backside (the indignity!), gave her a shot, gave The Beloved and I a $25 salve to rub on her sore backside twice a day and a weeks' worth of amoxicillin. We get to go back in a week for a checkup and another shot. But, man--what an evening. And what a way to start the morning! This kitty is a big girl. According to the scale last night, she is 18 pounds of cat. She insists she's just big-boned.

The Beloved and I have four cats. Naturally, the sick one is my favorite. Now, I know you're not supposed to have favorites, and I would beg you to keep my dirty little secret, but she already knows. Polly came to live with us a couple of years ago with the hope that she would befriend our other female cat, Piper, who was being constantly tortured by our two male cats. I went to the shelter looking for a smallish, female, short-haired kitten. I came home with a three-year-old long-haired Norwegian Forest/Maine Coon cross. I couldn't help it! She was gorgeous--with her long hair (Well, sort of--she was in really rough shape when she came to the shelter so they shaved her. Half of her. Then the clippers burned out.), and her big, green eyes, and her double paws! How could anyone say no to that?

Her paperwork from the shelter said that she was ambivalent as far as humans were concerned and that she got along with other cats. This was all well and good because we had plenty of cat companionship, and her job was to be a friend to our scaredy-cat. However, when I got her home the first night, she performed some preliminary explorations, jumped up onto the couch behind The Beloved, and wrapped her front paws around him in a big kitty hug. Ambivalent, eh? She has slept on our bed every night since. And she has adopted The Beloved as her kitten--she grooms him frequently because obviously he is not grooming himself adequately.

She came to us with the name "Tiger Lilly," which was too unwieldy for us, so one of our first tasks was to find a new name for her. The shelter seemed to believe she knew her name (we didn't get much response to Tiger Lilly and felt that perhaps a new name would give her a fresh start out of kitty jail), so we agreed to give her a name ending with an "ee" sound. Unfortunately, that meant no Norwegian deity names. After an evening of discussion we ended up with Polly--which I think is short for Polydactyl and The Beloved thinks is short for "Miss Polly Prissy-Pants." It works. She is most definitely a Polly.

More importantly, she is my Polly, and I hope that she is on the mend and enjoying her day of rest in my closet, which is where I left her this morning when I had to take off my nursemaid hat and go to work.