Folks, let me tell you a story.

In the area in which Leonia and I live there are a lot of stray cats. Or perhaps "stray" is the wrong word: Let's call them "cats of no fixed abode." There's one group in particular that for some years now has been living in our back garden, and in the back gardens of most of our neighbours.

I don't mind this at all, because such an abundance of moggies means that the local rodent population is practically zero: I'd much rather the area was over run with cats than with rats and mice...

That said, a couple of times a year it's mating season for the kitties, which means that shortly thereafter we're blessed with the arrival of even more incredibly cute bouncy fluffies. Unfortunately most of these kittens succumb to feline influenza and other ailments within a couple of months, which - for cat-lovers like Leonia and myself - can be rather heart-breaking.

Our goal for the past decade or so has been to befriend the moggies so that we can catch them and take them to the vet to be inoculated. And in order to ensure that we're not thereafter completely overrun with healthy cats, steps would be taken to ensure that the population was kept down. OK, I'll stop beating about the bush and call a spayed a spayed: we want to get the little blighters neutered.

So we put out a little food for the eight-or-so cats every evening: just enough food for them to become comfortable with us and stay in the area, but not enough that they'll stop hunting mice (clever, eh?).

The trouble is that most of these kitties have enough human-fear to make them impossible to catch. They come around every evening and expect to be fed, but try and make a grab for them and zoom! they're gone.

Another problem is that if we ever do manage to catch one and get it neutered, there'll be the added difficulty of what to do with it: because we have a house-cat of our own, it wouldn't be possible to take in the stray. Nor would it be fair to just put the operated-on mog back out, because after such an operation the cat should be kept indoors for at least a week.

But that's all a moot point anyway, because we've never actually managed to catch one.

Anyway... One of the cats in particular was a lady cat that we nick-named "Mammycat" because of the large number of litters she's produced. She was incredibly skittish - even more so than her numerous offspring - but nevertheless she always made her daily appearance at the back door. For a stray, she was a very clean, beautiful cat, very elegant and dignified.

Last Saturday evening we fed the strays as usual, but Mammycat was rather late in making her appearance, and when she did arrive it was very clear that something was wrong: she wasn't walking straight. She was staggering a lot, and kept dipping her head to the right. Her eyes were constantly twitching back and forth. Clearly, this little miss was in a bad way.

We knew for certain that something was wrong when she did something she'd never done before: she came into the house. She sat down (or rather collapsed) just inside the door and didn't even budge when we approached her.

So after a brief discussion Leonia and I decided that we had to take her to the emergency veterinary clinic. Assuming that her ailment wasn't too serious, this would also be the ideal opportunity to - finally! - have Mammycat's very effective kitten-generating apparatus removed.

She didn't complain much when I put her into the cat box, which was a good sign. But then, one thing we'd noticed about Mammycat a few years back was that she never, ever meowed. The only sound she ever made was an occasional hiss if we got too close to her or her new kittens.

We drove out to the clinic and it took the vet only a couple of seconds to come to the same conclusion that we had: Mammycat had suffered a very serious stroke. The prognosis was not good: even with major surgery, her chances of survival were very slim, and her chances of a complete recovery were zero. The only option was to have Mammycat put to sleep.

Because Mammycat - even in her debilitated state - was very twitchy and nervous around humans, the vet decided that she needed to administer a sedative before she could give the cat The Big Injection. So she asked me to hold the cat while she went prepared the sedative. I reached out my hand to the moggy, and she suddenly spun around and bit me on the thumb. Which, believe me, hurt quite a bit.

I immediately cleaned out the wound with one of those anti-bacterial washes, and then we carried on with the dreadful but necessary task.

It's a horrible thing to have to do, but... It was for the best. With the sedative administered, Mammycat calmed down enough that we were able to hold her still. The vet used an electric shears to shave a patch of fur from her leg, then found a vein in her leg and injected her with a large dose of a sinister-looking blue liquid.

Mammycat fell asleep, and a few minutes later her breathing stopped.

Leonia and I were pretty upset on the drive home. Even though she wasn't our cat, and she was never exactly what you might call friendly, she'd been a familiar face at the door for a good number of years. She was the mother of at least twenty kittens, and had outlived almost all of her offspring.

Here's the only known photo of the late Mammycat, being checked out by one of her daughters, Pastry, who died last year.

Even though we always say that we're not going to name the cats, we usually do. Pastry was so named because she had a tendency to hang out of the kitchen door and look in at us ("Shoo, Pastry!").

Over the years, we've been informal hosts to Blinky, Blip, Yakko, Wakko, Dot, Moo (whose black and white markings were somewhat bovine), Tab, Little Tab, Max, New Max, Jason (a very vocal cat... Jason Mewes, geddit?), Naval (grey and fluffy), Titan, and many, many others whose names I don't remember now, or who disappeared before we could name them.

But the story doesn't end there, because good ol' Mammycat left us with a little something by which we will always remember her...

I woke up on Sunday morning with my right hand throbbing in pain. Clearly, Mammycat's thumb-attack had been deeper than I'd first thought. It was the sort of wound that I just knew was going to leave a little scar. But that was OK: if you get to my age without receiving any scars then you're doing something wrong. I cleaned the wound again and re-bandaged it.

By four o'clock in the afternoon, it was pretty clear that this wasn't just a bite: my thumb had swollen to twice its original size, and the wound was starting to look pretty nasty.

So we drove down to the local hospital's Accident and Emergency section. By sheer luck, it was fairly quiet and I was seen after only an hour's wait. The attending doctor examined the wound, tried not to laugh when I told her how I got it, and proceeded to clean it out. Now, it's one thing to be bitten by a cat. That's painful. But it's nothing compared to a doctor squeezing the heck out of your wounded thumb in an attempt to clean out the infection, then realising that the infection is pretty deep and the only way forward is to make the wound a little larger. Using a scalpel.

Three serious pain-killing injections and a maddening amount of cutting, scraping and cleaning later, I was told that this wasn't enough and I was going to have to take a course of antibiotics. "Oh great," I said to myself. "That means a trip all the way down to the chemist first thing in the morning." Luckily, I was wrong about that. Unluckily, what the doctor actually meant was that I was going to have to be admitted for observation, for "at least twenty-four hours."

She bandaged up the wound, then I drove Leonia home, packed a bag and came back to the hospital, where I was brought back into the cubicle and a cannula was inserted into my right arm (a cannula is one of those things they stick in a vein that remains in place so that they can give you lots of medications without having to make lots of holes in your skin).

I was told that the infected wound had developed cellulitis, which - if left untreated - can have very, very nasty effects. After three separate doses of three different antibiotics, I was brought to the observation ward and given a bed.

The observation ward was a very peaceful place compared with the rest of the A&E department, so at least I was assured of a good night's sleep. Or I would have been, had it not been for the snoring. It seemed that I had the misfortune to arrive during the annual chainsaw impersonation competition... One of my fellow patients was snoring so loud he kept waking himself up.

Morning finally crawled around, and between the pain in my arm - which I'd had to keep elevated at all times - and the finals of Now That's What I Call Snoring, I'd been completely unable to sleep. This is why I was pretty groggy when the doctors and specialists were doing their rounds, and why I imagined that they were telling me I'd have to stay in for "at least another twenty-four hours". Except that I didn't imagine that bit at all...

So this was Monday, and I knew I wasn't getting home. Rats. I don't like not being in control of things, and even though this wasn't a situation I could control, I still wasn't happy. By this stage, I'd had eight different doses of antibiotics, plus some pills that I can't remember what they were called in order to bring down a minor fever which had struck late on Sunday night.

Now, one of the specialists was a particularly smart guy (well, they were all very smart, but this guy was at the top of the list): he suggested drawing a mark on my hand and arm that encircled the swollen area. That way, we'd know soon enough whether the medication was making a difference.

Leonia arrived at some stage (my sense of time was way off because of the medication and lack of sleep), bringing with her some spare clothes (t-shirt, socks and undies), slippers, books, food and sympathy. I kept dozing off while we were talking, which I imagine was pretty horrible for her, especially since at this point we still didn't know what the prognosis was.

Later on Monday I was seen by a team of orthopedic specialists who had the task of checking out the injury just in case my thumb's tendons were infected: I was told that if the tendons were infected, it would mean an operation (they told me exactly what would be done, but it's pretty scary so I won't repeat it here).

By Monday evening I'd slept enough to be more or less back-to-normal brain-wise, but still there was no improvement with the cellulitis. On the positive side, there had been no degradation either. My medication was changed again: I'd been on three antibiotic drips administered every six hours, and now it was one drip plus a huge injection every six hours.

I slept pretty well on Monday night, mostly because the champion snorer had gone home. Hooray! He was a really nice guy, but I was glad he was gone - for his sake as well as everyone else's.

So there was only three of us in the ward on Monday night. A quiet guy whose name I didn't quite catch, and a slightly older gentleman called Brian, who I have to say was probably the only reason I didn't go mad from boredom. I won't tell you what Brian was in for (because that's nobody's business but his own) but, Lordy, he was popular! Not only did he had more than twice as many visitors as everyone else put together, but he kept them all (and all the patients and staff) entertained with his esoteric knowledge and hilarious stories.

Tuesday morning, and still no improvement with the infection. By now I was known to everyone in the hospital as "the guy with the cat-bite", and I'm certain that a few of the doctors who came to check me out only did so because they wanted to see if the story was true, or maybe to see what sort of idiot I was. There's something rather undignified about having been hospitalised by a kitty, so I concocted the plan that when I got out I'd tell everyone that I'd been shot instead.

Even before the doctors did their rounds I knew what was going to happen: I wasn't going home on Tuesday. Another day of not being able to use the internet! Arrgh!

On the positive side, I got a lot of reading done. Because I was only able to use my left hand, I couldn't read any large books, which was annoying. And when you're a committed righty like I am, having to feed yourself or write with your left hand is staggeringly difficult. The one advantage I had is that early in 2006 I spent a whole week doing almost everything with my left hand, just to see how difficult it was (those of you who have read Sakkara will know why I did that).

Anyway: A second team of orthopedics people showed up on Tuesday afternoon and checked out my thumb, and they determined that there was enough movement to indicate that the tendon hadn't been damaged. Yay! No operation for me!

My medication was changed again, and by about eight in the evening it was clear that things were getting better. The redness and swelling were starting to subside, and now there was very little excruciating pain in my thumb, except when I accidentally banged it against something (which seemed to happen quite often).

I couldn't sleep much on Tuesday night, so I spent a lot of time dazedly wandering the silent corridors and stopping every now and then to read the fire-exit signs.

On Wednesday morning... Parole! Yes! The infection was declared to be under control and I was to be given my freedom! Cat-bite-man would be released into the wild once more!

After saying my good-byes to the lovely hospital people (and I have to say this: you hear a lot of bad things about the folks who work in hospitals, but every single person I met - from every level of the hierarchy - was friendly, helpful and dedicated to their job) and my fellow inmates, I took my first steps in the open air since Sunday evening, and then drove home. Very, very slowly, because I still don't have full mobility in my right thumb.

So now I'm on a course of two types of antibiotic pills, and I have to go back for a check-up next Wednesday. I'm still zonked after all this, and it's hard to type (not that that's stopping me). I'm going to have to take things easy for the next few days, so I'll probably cut my workload to about eight hours a day. I might even take the weekend off.

What have I learned from all this? Well, I've learned that sometimes even when you try to do the right thing, you can suffer. But maybe I haven't learn that at all, because if one of the other stray cats becomes sick I'll still take it to the vet and risk another bite. But I will wear gloves.

Maybe the only thing I've learned is that you can't get superhuman "cat-powers" from an infected cat-bite. Darn.