Last night I went to bed a little early because this cold is still kicking my butt.  I wanted to go to bed a lot earlier, but I am now glad I didn’t.  About 9:30pm I was on the phone with my mom and I started hearing noises.  At first I thought it was Izzie trying to get out of her metal crate, but she never does that.  Then I thought, oh my god, someone is breaking into my house.  I even thought I heard whispering (oh god, am I on LOST?!).  So, with my mom still on the phone, I peeked into Izzie’s room – asleep in her crate.  I walked out into the living room – nothing out of place.  As I am walking back to the bedroom, I hear the noise coming from Jasper’s room. Yes, my animals each have their own room in our house.  Izzie’s room doubles as the office, and Jasper’s room doubles as the guest room.  I open the door and flip the light on, expecting to see an intruder.  Jasper was on the ground, just hysterical.  The noise had been her bouncing off the walls and everything in the room.  She looked like she was having a heart attack or some sort of seizure. I was really scared I was losing her.  As I got closer, and threw the phone down, I realized she had her leather spiked collar in her mouth, like the bridal of a horse – between her top jaw and her lower jaw.  It was tight, and she was totally stuck, and freaking out.  I tried to undo the collar, but the buckle was in her mouth and she wouldn’t hold still.  I thought briefly about cutting it off, but there wasn’t enough time to get scissors, the collar was almost too tight to cut, and I was afraid she would dissapear and freak out under the bed where I couldn’t get to her.  So, I just pulled as hard as I could, and pulled the collar off over her head.  There are tufts of fur all over the carpet, her little heart was beating so fast (as was mine!) and she has a red welt on her bottom lip area from where the leather collar was cutting into her little kitty skin.  Poor Jasper.  As I was lying in bed trying to calm my fast beating heart I started thinking about how many lives this poor kitty has lost in her lifetime with me.  Here’s the list.  A lot of these are humorous to us now, even though they were not when they happened. They are not necessarily in chronological order.  It will be interesting to see how many she has left!

1.  Last night’s incident probably caused her a little kitty heart attack.

2.  She has gotten her neck stuck in the handles of a plastic shopping bag . . .

3.  . . . twice at least.  She runs around the house, frantic, knocking over everything in her path over.  I can imagine her little kitty brain thinking . . . “Oh my god, It’s chasing me! It’s chasing me!”  This happened during my parents’ summer visit to see us in CT one year, and then exactly a year later during another visit.  Read: I only get the BIG shopping bags when my mom comes to visit!

4. During my sophomore year of college, she pushed the screen out of the window of my apartment and jumped.  Luckily we lived on the 1st floor, but she did spend many hours in the bush outside the window, in the rain, before we realized she was missing.

5.  Also during my sophomore year, she had her worst incident yet, one that the people involved thought she might actually die from.  I was out of town, and didn’t hear about the incident until a number of years/months later.  My kitty is black, as you can see.  My roommate’s boyfriend at the time stepped out of bed in the dark and stepped right onto the cat.  I believe Jasper then mauled his foot and ran away under my bed.  I think they were seriously afraid he had killed her, but she was just fine.  I never even knew she was hurt.

6.  On a visit to my parents house, we had her locked in my parents bedroom and we started hearing horrible cat fighting noises.  A neighborhood cat, who wanted to “get with” the lovely and pure Jasper, pushed the screen out to get into my parents bedroom.  A cat fight ensued.  I am not sure who won, but Jasper came out with a mouth full of the other cat’s hair.  A few days later she developed a really nasty thing on her back.  She had to be shaved, and they had to put a drain in her back.  Good stuff.

So unless I am forgetting something (it seemed like more last night), she’s got 3 lives left.