My cat pees on us/bed in the mornings (behavioral question)

Just to get things out of the way:

• We have two cats, but I'm positive based on smell and urine quantity that it is consistently my larger male cat. They are both spayed/neutered.

• yes, he's been to the vet repeatedly for his urine troubles. He does have something like idiopathic cystitis unless he's on a prescription diet. With the diet, he's litter box behavior is normal.

• he doesn't have a problem with the litter box the vast majority of the time. The boxes are cleaned before we go to bed, so the boxes are not bad off throughout the night/early morning since both cats don't tend to use it much before being fed.

• The last notably stressful thing to happen to him was back in November of last year when he got out for around 24 hours. Doesn't mean it can't happen, of course, but we haven't noticed any other signs of stress/aggression/illness/etc. Yes, he went to the vet after his escapade.

Now, on to the post.

My SO and I are pretty good about feeding the cats in the morning between 6:30-7:30. Varies a little based on when we get up for work and how our morning is going. It seems as though my male cat is getting into the habit (it's been this way the last three or so times it happened) of urinating on us or right beside us on the bed if we're not up. Clearly this is not desired, but at the same time it seems impossible to NOT reward it (in his eyes) - it wakes us up (we have to deal with the mess), and it's breakfast time so he gets fed. We can't "just change" meal time because of work schedules.

I'm at a loss as to what to really do here. We live in a one bedroom apartment. If we close the door to the bedroom, he will absolutely rip up the carpet and everything around the door trying to get in (I've never seen a cat with such an aversion to closed doors). Sometimes if one of us sleeps on the couch, he'll use normal methods to wake us up there (paw at head, play with feet, etc) but the person in the bed runs a risk of getting peed on if that doesn't work for some reason (as was the case this morning). Today I woke up from his business around 7:10am. My alarm was set for 7:15am.

This seems to only happen in the mornings as well. While we're typically home to feed them in the evenings, sometimes we have plans or delays. He doesn't piss on the bed waiting for us to get home, even if it runs an hour or more past schedule (except in the instance that the boxes were not clean).

So reddit, any ideas on how to go about handling this?

Side note, does anyone know of a waterproof bed liner that actually works? We've been through like three of them, including an expensive one that I bought with this latest mattress directly from the mattress store. NONE of them f*cking work. Urine just goes right through them, no matter how plastic and awful they feel. It's like the only thing that would work is a tarp!

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