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We know from experience that Saffy should be treated like Hannibal Lecter: restrain or get your face bitten off.

Saffy, our feline housemate who is almost 15, has a toothache. How do you know if a cat has a toothache? If they drool, their breath smells worse, they make horrible faces and noises while eating (like they’re trying to dislodge particles caught in their teeth) and keep batting their cheeks. Saffy kept swatting her face so much, her cheeks became raw. To prevent her from wounding herself we cut her claws, an operation which takes at least three people—one to hold Saffy, one to wield the nailclipper, one to hold the other front paw or she’ll take your eye out. There were just two of us, and Saffy split our upper lip so we had duckface for a couple of days. (Drogon allows us to cut his nails. Mat spends half the day buffing his claws on cardboard so we don’t need to cut them.)

Yesterday we took Saffy to her vet, Dr. Mayem at Pendragon Clinic in QC. Mayem extracted four of Saffy’s rotten teeth some years ago—we’ve kept them in a sealed vial, in case we need to cast a terrible hex—and is familiar with the little monster (some of the staff still bear scars). But this time, the vets had something to prevent Saffy from maiming them: a cat grooming bag, or as we like to call it, a straitjacket for crazy cats.

Thanks to this genius invention, Saffy got through her blood test without fuss. Her liver and kidney are fine, so she could be sedated for a dental exam. The vet found an abscess in her gums that was causing her pain and prescribed an antibiotic and a cat-friendly analgesic. No extraction, although we will have to bring her back in a couple of weeks to have her teeth cleaned.

We got a cat grooming bag/straitjacket so we could administer Saffy’s antibiotics without bloodshed (ours). Cat grooming bags are available at Pendragon, Php1,288 for the medium-sized one. Call Pendragon, 0922-VETHELP.