The adventures of Sophie at the vets office

Seriously. I mean, look at that. Adorbs.

In tonight's episode, we put a cat on a bland diet! Don't forget to set your DVRs!

Despite being as ridiculously adorable as ever - and not acting sick at all - in the past few weeks Sophie has been doing her best impression of a world-class barf machine. It seemed like every morning during the past several weeks, I awoke to a new pile of extremely unwelcome kitty barf on my carpet. Her range seemed to be limited to the hallway and part of the living room right off the dining room, but we're still talking a lot of kitty barf and a lot of cleaning up to do. It didn't help that I got sick myself last weekend. We were both hurling like champs, although I managed not to mess up the carpet. But cleaning up kitty barf on a good day is stomach churning, having to do it when my stomach was already churning on its own just added insult to injury.

Most of the kitty barfing appeared to be taking place during the night so that there would be a fresh deposit to greet me in the morning, but Sunday evening around 7pm Sophie started up with the heaving and I decided that enough was enough. She was due to go in for her annual checkup this month anyway, so as she furnished my carpet with a few new spots of bile, I got online and made an appointment with the vet.

I honestly thought her problem was just overeating. I switched her to Iams a few years ago on the vet's advice, and she seems to like it just fine. She gets two cans a day (am and pm) and sometimes she eats it all, sometimes she picks and leaves quite a bit of to be thrown out. She also has dry food out all the time, so no matter what, she's not going to go hungry, especially when you consider that she clocks in at around ten pounds and also gets more excited about dry food than any other animal I've ever seen. A few months back Iams came out with a new and apparently delish line of food, because next thing you know, she's polishing off every bit of it. And although the new food has been around for a few months and the puking didn't really start in earnest until the last few weeks, in my infinite wisdom I figured that was the cause - she was eating herself sick. Which is probably why I'm not a veterinarian.

So we scored a quick Monday afternoon appointment. Fun fact: Our vet always requests a fecal sample. First vet I've had that did that. So I raided the cat box, but who wants to carry around cat poop in a clear plastic bag? Not this girl. So I cleverly hid it in a festive Brighton bag:

The only time you'll ever find something
inexpensive in a Brighton bag. No kidding, 
there is actual cat shit in there.

Then Dr. Thatcher, who is awesome by the way, gave her a very groping abdominal exam but didn't find anything out of the ordinary. In fact, he told me that if I hadn't mentioned her recent barf factory activity, he wouldn't have noticed anything off about her.

Awesome Dr. Thatcher also didn't seem to put much stock in my overeating theory. Apparently excessive vomiting in cats can be caused by any number of issues, but since he didn't find any visible physical causes, he decided to start with her diet. Maybe the new line of food has an ingredient that not only makes it uber-tasty going down, but triggers it to come back up. So he started talking about putting her on a bland diet.

I had never heard of a bland diet for cats. And I wondered how, exactly, do you put a cat on a bland diet? Well, now I know:

That's right: Baby food. Meat flavored
baby food.

Turns out Sophie won't eat baby food straight, so I'm mixing it with the canned food. Also, I've been instructed to dole her food out to her in small, frequent meals, so Sophie is officially high maintenance. No simple twice-a-day feedings for her anymore!

The good news is, the first day has gone well. She hasn't barfed since Sunday night and Dr. Thatcher called this afternoon to let me know her blood, urine and Brighton kitty poop tests all came back clear. So we're going to see how the diet thing goes, but happily, it seems that despite the kitty vomit orgy of the past few weeks, Sophie is apparently good to go as she enters the second decade of her ridiculously photogenic life.

Resistance is futile.