Katana has the sniffles this week (awwww), and due to her FIV status I'm hovering like a worried mother hen, just a little. I think it's just allergies - A bought me flowers for Valentines (unprecedented!), and every time she goes near them, she screws up her nose and starts sneezing. We've been keeping them in the bathroom with the door closed (thank you, Katana, I'll probably never get flowers again), and they're nearly dead now, so once they're gone, things should get back to normal. I tried to wipe her nose with a damp cloth a couple of times, but the situation threatened to go straight to stage three of Administering Medication To Cats, as described in Terry Pratchett and Gray Jolliffe's The Unadulterated Cat:

However healthy the cat, there will come a time when it needs a Pill. Oh, how we nod and look like respectable, concerned cat owners as the vet hands us the little packs (one grey one every five days and then a brown one after ten days, or was it the other way round?) And once we were all innocent and thought, the cat food smells like something off the bottom of a pond anyway. Real cat can't possibly notice if we crumble the damn things up a bit and mix them in...

As we get wiser, of course, we learn that the average Real cat has taste buds that make the most complex computer-driven sensory apparatus look like a man with a cold. It can spot an alien molecule a mile off (we tried halving the suspect food and adding more from the tin, and kept on doing it until it was like that famous French chemical experiment with the weird water and everything, there surely couldn't have been any pill left, but Real cat knew). Next comes the realist phase ("after all, from a purely geometrical point of view a cat is only a tube with a door at the top.") You take the pill in one hand and the cat in the other…

Er...

You take the pill in one hand and in the other you take a large kitchen towel with one angry cat head poking out of the end. With your third hand you prise open the tiny jaws, insert the pill, clamp the jaws shut and, with your fourth hand tickle the throat until a small gulping noise indicates that pill has gone down. You wish. It hasn't gone down. Because it's just gone sideways. Real cats have a secret pouch in their cheeks for this sort of thing. A Real cat can take a pill, eat a meal, and then spit out the slightly damp pill with a noise which, if this was a comic strip, would probably be represented as ptooie.

It is important to avoid the third stage, which basically consists of Man, Beast and Medicine locked in dynamic struggle and ought to be sculpted rather than described (as in Rodin's "Man Giving Pill to Cat").

The fourth stage is up to you. Usually by now the cat is displaying such a new lease of life that the treatment might be said to have worked. Grinding the pill up with a bit of water and spooning it in sometimes does the trick. A fellow Real cat owner says powdering the wretched object — the pill, not the cat, although by stage four you'll entertain any idea — mixing it with a little butter and smearing it on a paw is a sure-fire method, because the cat's ancient instinct is to lick itself clean. Close questioning suggested that he hadn't actually tried this, just deduced it from theoretical studies (he's an engineer, so that explains it). Our view is that an animal that will starve and asphyxiate before taking its medicine won't have any trouble with a grubby paw.

So I have abandoned the attempt, unless someday I am told otherwise by a vet.

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Someone at work has me so angry. I don't generally do angry.

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ETA: Am at work, can't reply to comments right now, but a) yes, there were lilies involved - and red roses, aw. I knew about cats and lilies, but unfortunately A didn't. He does now! And b) The Unadulterated Cat is awesome and here is another excerpt:

It's an interesting fact that fewer than 17% of Real cats end their lives with the same name they started with. Much family effort goes into selecting one at the start ("She looks like a Winifred to me"), and then as the years roll by it suddenly finds itself being called Meepo or Ratbag.

...

The chosen name should also be selected for maximum carrying power across a busy kitchen when, e.g., a bag full of prime steak starts moving stealthily towards the edge of the table. You need a word with a cutting edge. Zut! is pretty good. The Egyptians had a catheaded goddess called Bast. Now you know why.

We selected Katana in the full knowledge that 'Kat!' is what we'll probably remember/yell in moments of crisis. *g*