Pet story TWO from my distant past...

Alright kids, here is pet story number two; a cherished pet story from way back! A long time ago, in a shag-carpeted 1979 Chevy van, two kids decided to "help" their cat with its travel anxiety. The story went like this..

On another excursion from the cottage back to New Jersey, our pet cat (again, Daisy) was exhibiting her usual travel anxiety, actually MUCH worse than the usual travel anxiety. By the time we were 20 minutes into the trip, after Daisy ran up my back to use my skull as a lookout post of sorts, my sister and I decided that we would try to chill out our crazed kitty to preserve our scalps and epidermis.

My sister and I were familiar with the tranquilizing effects of the motion-sickness medicine Dramamine. We figured we could help Daisy mellow out a bit by slipping her a little Dramamine in a cat snack. So, we prepped out home-brewed sedative and fed it to DAISY and waited for the expected result- a mellowed out cat. To our fright, we found something quite to the contrary! Almost immediately after feeding Daisy the Dramamine snack, she started to foam at the mouth like a rabid dog. It looked like when you pop an Alka Seltzer tab into a little container of water- a volatile little fountain of foaming bubbles that seems like it won't stop bubbling!

As Daisy foamed at the mouth like a fiend, my sister and I freaked out, both scared that we had poisoned our cat and she would die right there in the van on the shag carpet. We wiped the foam away from her cat lips, but it just kept foaming, foam dripping all over the orange and brown carpet. We tried to splash some water on her face and that was when my mom spotted the odd commotion and asked us what the hell was going on in the back of the '79 shaggin' wagon van to make the cat foam like Cujo. We lied, a pattern for us back then, and told my mom we didn't know what happened and that she just started foaming at the mouth.

Fortunately for my sister and I, right as my mom started to step up her inquisition into the matter, Daisy puked up the Dramamine pill which prompted me to say "See mom, she just puked up a little hairball, she's OK!" As the foaming stopped, my sister and I broke into a typical kid laughing fit which lasted another 30 minutes. Just like the magic tapeworm incident, we thought this was absolutely hysterical. Well, that is after we were certain that Daisy was NOT going to die from Dramamine ingestion!

I guess the moral of the story, if there is one, is that you should never give your cats Dramamine and probably avoid Alka-Seltzer too