Monthly Archives: February 2020

a fighter by his trade

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Now tell me again just how many lives a cat has. We aren’t sure how many Sylvester has used up, but surely he must be getting close to the limit.

He came home Saturday limping — was that morning or late evening? I can’t remember. Leah said he seemed sore all over. He complained when she touched him almost anywhere on his body. That is pretty much normal for him these days. Not the limping, but the overall sensitivity to being touched. Maybe it was a sprain, we thought. Maybe he would get better, we thought. He was still limping badly on Tuesday, so we took him to the vet. She dragged him out of the carrier and palpated his leg while her assistant held on firmly. I don’t know why he didn’t kill everyone in the room, because he certainly would have if we had tried that. She said she couldn’t feel anything except a swollen leg. No breaks, no obvious wounds. So he got an antibiotic shot and came home with us. Today, Thursday, he can still barely touch his left front foot to the ground.

His routine lately has been to come in, maybe in the morning or maybe late in the afternoon, eat, and spend several hours asleep in a living room chair. Then he might eat, and go to the door to go back outside. And he goes, no one knows where, but he stays out all night.

There are at least three new cats around, two all white and one black and white. We know who “owns” them, but no one keeps them inside. At least one of the new cats is a male. We know that because we have seen him spraying in our front yard. The other two are probably female. We don’t know whether Sylvester is fighting them. If so, he’s not doing well. We are wondering whether he makes the rounds, visiting each one on successive days, getting his butt kicked by each one in turn.

We were trying to think of how many times Sylvester has been to the vet for ailments or injuries. We believe that the number is countable, but for us it is unknown. He has one large, hairless scar on the back of his head that took weeks to heal. There is another scar lower on his neck. I can’t remember which that one is. He also recently recovered from something (someone?) apparently taking his head into its mouth, with one set of teeth on the top of his head and the opposing set on his face, which included his eye. That was the time he had an actual dent in the cornea.

And, of course, there was the time he disappeared for six weeks, apparently spending much of that time in a neighbor’s garage/storage shed. He came home thin and with ailments of his fundament, probably caused by lack of fluids.

Before that he has spent time in stir I mean boarding at the vet’s for urinary problems. Was that only once, or was it twice? Who knows?

When he goes outside, I think of old movies about boxers. Sylvester is the one that staggers to his corner with blood coming from his nose, one eye black and nearly swollen closed, dizzy and confused. And still he goes back out into the ring.

Snow and fog

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It started snowing Saturday morning about the time I got out of bed. It didn’t amount to much for a while. By the time I took the dogs for a walk, it was beginning to stick.

That was around 10 am. Even though it had been fairly warm earlier in the week, the snow was starting to stick on the roads. By the time we got back home, there was about two inches.

And then, by the afternoon, it was all gone.

The temperature dropped a little overnight, although not below freezing. When we got up Sunday morning, we had dense fog. This was up close to the top of the mountain, when I took the dogs for their walk.

The fog got thinner the lower we went. I think that means it was actually a cloud by that time.

Our weather has been wet and quite warm. It rained a lot before we got the snow, and it’s raining again now, as I write this Monday evening. We have had a fire most of the recent days, but, except for a couple of really cold nights, we could have done without. Now, the temperature is actually supposed to go up though the night. It’s 50F now and is supposed to be around 60F by morning. It looks like winter is almost over. At least that’s what this clematis thinks.

Clematis is deciduous; it’s not supposed to start leafing out until spring. We have some bulbs that are similarly early. In fact, some of our bulbs sprouted new foliage even before all the old leaves had turned brown and shriveled.

This weather. It’s all so confusing.

Lessons, learned and not learned

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I have been taking the dogs out into our front yard for a post-lunch play session for quite a while now. Ever since the great dog escape I have been putting Zoe on a long leash and letting Sam run free. That has worked pretty well. Sam can run around and escape from Zoe’s attacks, and then come back for more punishment.

A few days ago when I took them for their morning walk, Zoe was so full of energy that she could hardly contain herself. She desperately wanted to run. So Thursday afternoon, I decided to put Sam on a long leash and let Zoe run free. I expected her to run in big circles around the yard, but she didn’t. Instead, she ran about 30 feet away, and then turned to stalk Sam. That went on for a while. And then Zoe walked down to the bottom of the grassy part of the yard and into the woods.

I called her. I yelled for her. She ignored me and continued into the woods.

If this had happened 35 years ago, back when I had knees and could run on them, I would have chased her. These days, all I can do is walk at a determined pace, which is not enough to keep up. But I had Sam, I thought, and Sam could find her.

So I took Sam down through the narrow band of trees at the front of the yard to the street. Based on the direction Zoe had been walking, I planned to take Sam to Fouche Gap Road and head her off. But when I got there, Sam continued across the road towards the other end of Lavender Trail. I figured Sam knew what he was doing, and was following Zoe. So I let him go. We went up the steep grade towards the dead end, where I had found all the shotgun shells a few days earlier. I tried to jog a little, which demonstrated, if I needed it, that 30 minutes on the stepper is not an eight-mile run.

When we got to the top, my phone rang. A neighbor up the road in the opposite direction had caught Zoe. So, Sam was faking it.

When I managed to get back home, I drove up to our neighbor’s house and retrieved Zoe. She seemed glad to see me and hopped right into the car.

It’s clear that Zoe did not learn her lesson from when she disappeared for four days. However, I have learned my lesson: I cannot let Zoe off the leash. That’s a disappointment. I had hoped to have a normal dog, like all of my other dogs except Zeke, who could be trusted not to run away.

Sam’s problem

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On Tuesday afternoon I was working at my desk with both dogs lying behind me when I heard a loud commotion. I thought they were play-fighting, but when I looked back I realized that Sam was having a seizure.

He was on his side with his rear legs drawn up, he was shivering, and his upper body was swaying from side to side. His eyes were so dilated that his pale blue irises were just a thin rim about the black of his pupils.

Sam had a seizure about a year earlier one night while we were in bed. It looked pretty much the same. This time I immediately took him to the vet. He couldn’t walk, so I had to carry him to the truck. He has always had problems with car sickness, so I wasn’t surprised that he vomited. When I got to the vet’s he jumped out of the truck and was able to walk in. They saw him pretty quickly.

He was a little shaky, but seemed to be over the seizure. The vet looked at her records and saw that he had actually had two previous seizures. The first was in 2018. The second was about a year later. This one was about eight months later. She said it was probably a form of epilepsy, and that we should monitor him, and if the seizures came less than a month apart, she would put him on medication.

And then he had another seizure in the vet’s office.

She gave him a valium, which didn’t really calm him much. So she gave him an injection, which calmed him immediately.

Phenobarbital is the most common treatment for epileptic seizures in dogs. The vet said the hope is that it will keep the seizures to no more than once a month. I hate to think of poor Sam going through a seizure like this that often. It’s a hard thing to watch, knowing that you can’t do anything for him. I assume it’s worse for him to actually go through it.

On Wednesday he seemed completely normal. I took him and Zoe out into the front yard for their regular after-lunch play period. He chased around, rolled on the ground, and chewed on Zoe’s cheeks just as he always has. He seems no worse for the experience.