DC shut down early on Tuesday so I decided to use the time to my advantage to prepare for Valentine's Day. I bought a really nice candle at Carbon and then went next door to the florist to get some nice flowers. When I got home I hid them in my closet so Amy wouldn't find them. How nice would it be, I thought, for her to wake up in the morning to fresh (well, not so fresh, since they were in my closet) flowers, and think "How on earth did he go out to get these without waking me up?"

So we woke up - I got her a cute card (it had this on it - we're morbid like that) - and I put the flowers on her desk next to the candle and card, a batch of some weird lookin' ones, a little grass lookin' stuff, and what I would soon find out were Asiatic Lilies.

Check this page for a picture of the cute flowers I got. And then scroll up to that headline. The big bold one with the three exclamation points after it. The one that says

Lilies can be deadly for your cat!!!

I didn't know that. At all. I'm sure it was mentioned to me at some point, but at this time my mind was occupied with the need to impress. It took Amy, however, about twelve seconds to recover from how impressed she was with me to asking, "Are these lilies?" I was like, "uh, yeah!" wanting her to think "wow, he actually knows what flowers he got me!"

Instead, I got "Can't lilies be deadly for your cat?" And a quick internet search confirmed that, yes, if our cats, Moesha and Anyang, had been playing around the lilies at any point, when they were in the closet, or when I had them beautifully arranged on Amy's desk, if one or both of them had ingested even the tiniest leaf from the lily, they could DIE of renal failure within three days.

So we did what any reasonable parents would do. We freaked out. Anyang had thrown up about half an hour before - could that be a sign he ate some? Moesha was behaving a bit listless - is she dying? Not knowing quite what to do, we threw them in a cab and dragged them to the animal clinic in Dupont Circle. Presenting the vet with our specious evidence of the cats' imminent mortality, she promptly stuck thermometers up both of them and then recommended that we give them each a $500 procedure that would involve inducing vomiting, feeding them charcoal, and then keeping them on IV drips for two days and nights.

Now, I've never been that attached to the cats. Moesha is okay, though she likes to put her butt in my face. Anyang likes to chew on my chin while I sleep, and eats like an aspiring sumo wrestler. But I didn't want to appear callous so I suppressed the instinct to say "Hell no!" and said, "well can we do a buffet style treatment?" The doctor said we could induce vomiting and do the charcoal treatment for less than a hundred dollars combined, and skip the IV. So I was like "Why not? "

Of course, after they were whisked away we were starting to ask why we bothered with it. "Why are we putting them through this torture?" Amy said. "It'll only make them more obnoxious."

"Better safe than sorry," I said.

"But we didn't even see them chew on the lily. We could be doing this for no reason."

"There's a reason," I thought to myself. "I like to put the fear of God into them every now and then. Just like I will with my real kids someday."

"What?"

"Did I just say that out loud?"

Well, everything turned out fine. But it is true that they are developing a healthy anxiety complex. Take a look at this photo of Anyang, who got mauled when we took them home to my parents house for the holidays:
Yes, that's a cone around his head. It's to keep him from ripping out the stitches on that shaved part of his side. The same thing happened to Moesha when I took her home last Christmas. She was smart enough not to get a cone.

So that's how we spent Valentine's Day. Let this be a lesson to you. Don't try to impress your catowning girlfriend with Asiatic Lilies.

She wasn't perfect either though. Trying romantically to indulge my Matt Damon man-crush, she got me Ocean's 11, Ocean's 12, and The Departed - but she also got me The Talented Mr. Ripley and Syriana, which I already own. So I guess we're even for the whole cat thing.

Labels: Anyang, cat, dead, die, kill, lily, Moesha, poison, Valentine, vet