Adolf has hepatic lipidosis, and what fun it’s turning out to be.

The condition is caused, I’m told, by a cat becoming anorexic (and who would ever have guessed that I, so fond of telling Kate Moss to eat a damn sammich every time I see her on TV (remember, the camera adds ten pounds, which makes her and Nicole Richie a pair of chopsticks) would have an anorexic cat?  I can just imagine Adolf in front of a mirror, deriding himself since he can’t fit into last year’s collar anymore).  It’s particularly bad if the cat is overweight, which Adolf most certainly was not — just big-boned with lots of extra flesh to cover the big bones up.

Once the cat stops eating, the liver stops working, and apparently a load of fat cells are released into the body.  This makes the cat even less hungry, I guess because he’s suddenly aware just how much shit he’s been eating over the past years.  I offered to donate part of mine, but he said something about alcohol awareness and went back to not eating and turning a bright, bright shade of yellow (yessir, kids, jaundice isn’t just for your drunken Irish uncle anymore!).

So I took him to the vet, he stayed for a week, running up a room service tab that will take me well into next year to recover from, and now he’s home.

With a plastic tube sticking out of the top of his neck.

Yeah, the doc tells me that we have to make Adolf eat for about 6-7 weeks, and this is the easiest way.  She obviously wasn’t aware of my squeamishness when it comes to holes in bodies that really just shouldn’t be there.  I’d hate to see the hardest way.

But after a day, he seems to be doing better.  He’s still way thin, bones a-poking — my God, I accidentally adopted Kate Bosworth! — and obviously not feeling too good, though he’s moving around a little and jumping up onto my chair.  I just hope he gets hungry soon, because putting a syringe in a tube that is sticking out of him — it’s a little disconcerting.

Okay, a lot.