Apparently He Can Take It AND Dish It Out

(This photo is representative of me hiding my head in shame for forgetting I had already used this photo a couple of weeks ago. It's cute though, so it's worth repeating, right?)

Gus and Q*bert have never been good friends, though I think their relationship is improving, slowly. Very, very slowly. Anyway, they have this little game they play when Gus is trying to come in from outside. Q sits on one side of the pet door and Gus sits on the other, and they smack at each other through the flap. It's kind of funny, but they're not playing, exactly. Yesterday, things got a bit heated, and later that day, we noticed Gus had a huge scratch across his face--across his eye socket, to be exact. I was terrified that his eye got scratched, but miraculously, it didn't. I guess that's a benefit of having eyelids and knowing when to use them.

One of the scratches, the one above his eye, was bleeding quite a bit. He wasn't overly interested in letting me nurse him, so I had to wait until he got sleepy (which, for a cat, is guaranteed eventually). What he was interested in was catching a fly, scratching on his cat tower, and batting at Samson from the top of a chair. I really was marvelling at his resilience; wasn't he in pain? Why wasn't he feeling sorry for himself?

About five minutes later, he curled up in a chair and fell asleep on a pillow. I moved in to clean up his eye, and while he woke up enough to be moderately annoyed, he did let me wipe his wound off with medicated wash and put some honey on it. Later, when I checked on him, the honey had melted a little and was starting to drip in his eye (he apparently didn't notice), and he let me wipe off the excess.

I really was amazed at how strong he is. Even as a kitten, when he had a broken arm, he never complained or acted sick. He was more upset that he was confined to a crate than anything else. But now, here I was, freaking out about a scratch, and he just wanted to play and be a cat. So I took that as a cue. He wasn't going to die from the scratch or even lose his sight. He wasn't worried, so I shouldn't be either. There was time to let him be a cat, and when he was ready to really be a cat (i.e. fall asleep), I could move in and do my thing.