We Both Thought the Cat Had Gotten Her Evening Medicine

I found the treat on the saucer at 9:38 p.m. It had gone hard around the edges.

Nori’s evening medicine was usually tucked inside one of those soft treats. The empty pouch was beside it, exactly where my dad left it after setting everything up. Nori was asleep on the back of the sofa, looking completely unconcerned.

Did she actually get this?

Dad came in from the garage, looked at the saucer, and then looked at me.

I thought you gave it to her.

I had thought the same thing about him. That was the entire system.

Nori is sixteen. She has a white patch under her chin and a habit of appearing in the kitchen the second a packet opens. Most evenings, medicine was easy: one of us prepared it, she ate it, and we carried on. The problem was that “one of us” changed depending on who got home first.

The routine worked until it didn’t

I had moved back in with my dad for a few months while my flat was being repaired. He had cared for Nori alone for years, so I was helping, not taking over. At least that was how both of us understood it.

If I was cooking, I handled her evening food and medicine. If Dad was already in the kitchen, he did. Sometimes he prepared the treat and left it out because Nori had vanished upstairs. Sometimes I saw the pouch and assumed the empty saucer meant she had eaten.

We used a lot of sentences that sounded like confirmation but were not.

Nori’s sorted.

I’ve got the cat.

Did “sorted” mean the treat was ready, or that she had swallowed it? Did “got the cat” mean dinner, medicine, litter, or all three? We never asked because the routine was familiar and neither of us wanted to make it feel complicated.

That night, neither of us could honestly say what had happened. Dad remembered taking the pouch out. I remembered seeing Nori in the kitchen. The treat on the plate suggested she had not received it, but we were not willing to guess.

We called the prescribing clinic’s out-of-hours number and explained exactly what we knew and did not know. We followed the advice they gave us for Nori’s specific prescription. That call was calm and practical. The ten minutes before someone answered were not.

Our first fix created a second mystery

The next morning, Dad put a sticky note on the refrigerator. It said only “NORI PM” with a square beside it.

For three evenings, the square got a checkmark. On the fourth, I found it checked before dinner. Dad could not remember whether he had marked it after giving the medicine or while setting it out so he would remember later.

We had managed to turn one uncertain thing into two.

We tried assigning the job permanently to Dad, but his shifts changed. Then we assigned it to me, and I had two late nights in the same week. Neither of us needed an alarm telling us Nori existed. We needed a handoff that showed what had actually happened.

We stopped recording intentions

The rule we finally made was painfully specific: the medicine was only marked complete after Nori had taken it. Preparing the treat did not count. Putting the pouch on the counter did not count. Saying “I’ll do it” did not count.

The completed entry showed a time and a person. If I opened the record at 8:15 and saw Dad’s name at 7:52, I did not have to wake him or inspect a saucer. If there was no entry, I knew the handoff still needed to happen.

We also put the prescribing clinic’s number and Nori’s current instructions in the same shared place. No more old notes on the refrigerator competing with takeaway menus.

Nori did not care about any of this. She still spits out the treat occasionally, eats the soft part around it, and looks offended when we try again exactly as her vet showed us.

But now the question is no longer “Did one of us probably do it?” There is an answer, and both of us can see it.