this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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I would be caring for the cat as an outside cat, I would wear long pants , forget the neighbours, they just do not care
first feed him up and get trust, then get drops to put in food
but mainly don't stress, he's a cat
set achievable goals, you don't have to look after him perfectly, good enough is good enough
and really, sometimes caring for someone else is a good way to destress
I’ve done the caring for him as an outside cat and it was incredibly stressful for me. A lot of labour and encourages him away from home. I just can’t do it anymore.
spoiler
I had to routinely don long clothes and gloves whenever I saw him then wash hands change out of clothes and shower fully with antifungal products and reapply treatment on my own lesions after. So much laundry on hot with sanitizer, and carpet shampooing. Frequent vacuuming. You have to regularly clean your house to prevent picking it back up from the environment so it’s a whole thing. And I can’t take constantly having to prevent reinfection after handling him. It was also hurting my mental health.He refused the ringworm tablet hidden in food, I got two doses down the hatch by wrestling him but then the next two nights he started hiding from me and I had to go looking for him. At that point I realised “this is crazy”, dumped all the cat stuff on the owners doorstep and emailed asking them to take him to the vet.
I don’t think they have. I’ve handed over all the treatments I have which will be expensive and an hassle to get more of. (The tablets are prescription only and came from the rescue lady. That liquid requires a script to be uploaded to buy it and vets don’t prescribe to animals they haven’t seen. The lime sulfur dip alone was $50 and I don’t know if he’d let me bathe him.) And I’m not legally able to confine someone else’s pet for treatment or take him to the vet myself. They will have to do it.
And he’s still hanging around my door waiting to rub up on me or door dash in while contagious.
So unless I want to be on an endless ringworm reinfection treadmill (I really don’t) I am going to have to be a Karen, make a report to RSPCA or the council. And I’m worried about the backlash when I do.
This is actually kind of a nightmare. I can’t begin to tell you how much I didn’t and don’t want to deal with this.
Melba. You over react. You over clean. Fungus on skin is not a deadly disease, so why the drama? Put some daktarin on skin. Wash things normally. Cleaning carpets so heavily can actually make pollution in house worse as you degrade the fibres and the glues. Give drops to cat.
talk to your doctor and do what they say
This reminds me of a friend I had. I made her high quality face masks with special medical filter I bought overseas. I showed her how to wash them , telling her they were delicate .
Then later she told me she scrubbed and wringed them hard to clean them well. I told her she ruined them and made them useless by ripping up all the filter in the inside layer and removing the special chemical that repelled germs.
She just did not want to believe me that scrubbing was wrong. I gave her no more masks, they took a long time to make and were expensive.
Good enough is good enough
No, I don’t overreact or overclean. And I’m not dramatic.
It may be a fungus but is not always a simple easy thing to get rid of if you have a google. My immune system also isn’t good (I’ve been treating it for 2 months and it spread). I can’t get the drops without a prescription.
Plus other people’s laziness means I’ve had to deal with something shitty that’s not my responsibility. And now have to nag them about it. And risk conflict if I report the neglect.
The only difference between this and weaponized incompetence is that they don’t even care enough to do it consciously.
I am so tired of other people’s bullshit.