The day started with an early morning run to the vet with Uno, a tabby with a deformed eye and golf ball-sized growth on his belly pulled from an apartment complex in Visalia. If one of my friends showed up with that belly, I’d tell him to cut back on the Coors Light, but a kitten? Seemed young for a tumor, my guess was some sort of hernia. After conferring with the vet, I greenlit surgery to remove the bad eye, mass and testicles…and headed back to check out a new blacklight Amazon had delivered the night before.
Two days prior, despite no fewer than eight UV flashlights in our Amazon order history, the crew insisted we needed a better unit to up our ringworm game. In their professional opinion, the lights we had on hand were much as Mama Su sees me, dim and unreliable, and given the downside of an outbreak, we needed an upgrade. Searching for “best ringworm blacklight” and “awesome cat urine UV light”, I happened on the uv Beast v2, a device out of the UK that reviewers claimed “GODLIKE!” “It’s a UV flamethrower!” “…20 minutes of listening to my wife gag and scream “OMG”, she hasn't stopped cleaning…” Ok, we’re done here. We’ll take two.
Out of the box, the Beast v2 feels like a weapon—solid aluminum, impressive heft, massive beam—and with six AA batteries loaded into the handle, I was ready to see if it could live up to the hype. None of the cats in the Big House are RW+ and I wasn’t about to open the door to a bathroom Mama Su has packed with kittens, but the Beast was “the best cat urine light ever…even in daylight” so I figured I’d fire it up and assess our living conditions.
The flooring of House Kirkland comprises 80s-era hardwood, tile and carpet, and the kitchen and front hallways were surprisingly sanitary considering the vindictive prima donnas and carefree paraplegics hauling about—a few bright spots here and there but nothing you’d lose a security deposit over. Continuing to my bedroom, I braced for worse but was pleased to find that there, too, the furry inmates have at least some respect for where most of us sleep.
Turning the corner to the master closet, I shone the Beast into the darkness…O…M…G. The closet lit up like the Vegas Strip! I left the closet light off and flashed the UV around the perimeter and was mortified to find the closet was basically a giant litter box. I dropped to my knees and sniffed the largest spots…How did I not notice this?…and then followed my nose to a box of junk soggy in some areas and crystalline in others. Ewww…guys…really…my closet?
As i write this, I can still smell the cat pee—“Did they get this shirt, too?”—but I’ll vouch for the uvBeast all day long. Ringworm, pet urine, a body…if it glows with DNA, the Beast will find it. As for little Uno, he survived surgery like a champ—the lump was a hemangioma, a tumor made up of blood vessels, unusual but not fatal—and he’s now chilling with a foster. Uno and the Beast.
