Sep 19, 2016 3 min read

I am currently nursing several bites, scratches and puncture wounds across my upper body. Nothing requiring hospitalization, or treatment for rabies, but that may still bear some watching. You see, my husband recently discovered one of our cats had a flea on him, and I can’t bear the thought of fleas. Not even one.

I’m sure I have written before about the time we had a flea problem. Cats infested, dog infested, carpet infested. I tried for weeks to battle them, kill them and starve them out. Unsuccessful in all of those attempts, it finally ended with me, wide-eyed and wild-haired, lighting most of our furniture and all our carpet on fire in the backyard, cackling in a demented fervor.

In an attempt to stave off a return trip to Crazy Town, I decided to give all the cats a flea bath yesterday just to be on the safe side. I called my middle girl in as backup, had my son on standby, and away we went.

Our first patient, Simon, has been with us for about four years. He is as easygoing as they come, unless, apparently, you try to bathe him. We had just wet his fur and begun to lather him the first time when he attempted to escape. A claw hooked into my pinky finger near the nail. I detached him from my hand and continued to scrub. A moment later, he tried again, this time putting a three-eighths-inch slice in the love line of my left palm. Again, we regained control.

He has never meowed – a remnant of an illness he had in the first month of his life, we suspected – until yesterday. A pitiful meow escaped his previously silent lips and, in our surprise, we relaxed our grip. Sensing our vulnerability, he leapt from my daughter’s arms and dug his way across my back. A deep claw mark to my shoulder is my gift from that attempt.

Finally, we finished with him and wrapped him in a towel to begin to dry and soothe him. He immediately became calm (and quiet).

The next cat hooked my collar bone, and the third snagged my girl’s chin. That cat – my Bella – also bit both of us. She was pretty passive-aggressive about it, in fact, licking the area she intended to bite just before sinking in her teeth.

When they were all finally bathed, they seemed to forget they had been “mean” to us, just as they were willing to forget we had been “mean” to them.

After treating the carpets, I cleaned myself and my daughter’s wounds. We found a few more on forearms, wrists and hands, but they all look relatively harmless. In all fairness, though, a bad case of cat scratch fever has been seen in our family, so I’ll watch for signs of it. I’ll also watch for signs of infection in the bites and scratches.

But truth be told, probably more than either of those things, I’ll be watching for any other signs of fleas. I’d like to keep my new furniture and, if possible, my sanity.

Laura Zoeller can be reached at zoeller5@verizon.net.