Category Archives: Cats

Chloë

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Our senior cat Chloë has gone to the great catnip field in the sky.

I have posted before about her lymphoma, and the relative success of steroid shots to help her intestines, but in the last week or so she has declined. She had lost about a quarter of her body weight in the last couple of months. She felt like a furry sack of bones. She was eating sporadically, if at all, and apparently not absorbing any nutrition from the food. Leah spent a lot of time trying different cat foods, but nothing seemed to work. Chloë spent all her time on our front porch. We put a kitty litter box out there because she was becoming careless in her elimination habits.

We finally understood that she was in enough distress that ending that distress was the only humane option. So we took her to the emergency vet clinic, four months after we took her son Dusty for the same reason.

We don’t remember when Chloë showed up at our old house. I think it was no more than a year after we moved in, so around 2006. She came complete with three half-grown kittens. Chloë was a gray tabby/calico. Two of her kittens were orange tabbies, and one was very close to Siamese. I find that cats can have different fathers for kittens in the same litter, a phenomenon called superfecundation.

I do not judge.

We tried to give the kittens away, but were only successful with the Siamese. The two orange tabbies became Rusty and Dusty. Rusty died about six years ago from FIV. Dusty died this January from lymphoma. Our other cats, Zoë, Smokey, and Sylvester, have disappeared. Zoë came with Leah when we married. Smokey and Sylvester appeared in our back yard not too long after Chloë showed up. We presume that Zoë was taken by a coyote. We found good evidence that Smokey suffered the same fate. Sylvester has been missing for nearly two weeks, and we hold little hope that he will reappear. A coyote is the most likely answer to what happened to him.

So Chloë was the last of the original six cats. She has been with us so long that it’s hard to imagine being without her.

Chloë will join her son Dusty and three dogs in our growing pet cemetery. I buried my mother’s little dog Lucy out there, then I buried Zeke. I had his friend Zeus cremated some time ago, and I put Zeus’s ashes in with Zeke to keep him company. Chloë always got along with Zeke. Now they will rest close to each other.

Nine and counting

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Our second oldest cat Sylvester has been missing for three days. He has a history of disappearing. About three years ago he disappeared for six weeks. He spent part of that time locked up in a neighbor’s garage. He was thirsty and hungry, but apparently none the worse for wear. He has also disappeared several times for one or two days. This time seems different, maybe because we lost another cat, Smokey, to a coyote right in our front yard, and Sylvester roams the neighborhood at night.

We have posted on Facebook, and checked around the neighborhood. The current owners of the garage he spent some time in opened their garage and looked around for us. No luck.

I have not given up hope, not completely. After all, cats do have nine lives. Or at least it seems like this cat has, or had, multiple lives. We are not sure which life he is on, but it’s surely pressing towards nine.

I wondered where the idea that cats have nine lives came from. Most people attribute it to the ancient Egyptians, who had a god called Amun-Ra, which is a composite of two gods, Amun, the creator, and Ra, the sun god. When it comes to cats and lots of lives, the story is that Amun-Ra sometimes appeared with the head of a cat, and that he somehow created eight additional gods, making a total of nine from this one (two) god(s).

This is Amun-Ra, killing a snake, which seems especially appropriate for Sylvester, since he was (maybe is still?) hell on small animals. On the morning of the night he disappeared, I found a partially-eaten small animal on our driveway. A going-away gift?

I don’t think Sylvester ever used a shiv on his prey, although I wouldn’t put it past him.

It seems that a number of other cultures, including the Chinese, had mythology of cats having more than one life, although not aways nine. We are hoping that Sylvester has at least one more life left.

Our other old cat, Chloe, is on her last life, and not doing very well. Our vet diagnosed her with lymphoma, mainly in her intestines. She shows the typical symptoms of lethargy and poor appetite. She has had a couple of steroid shots that helped with the symptoms, but her most recent shot didn’t seem to help that much.

She is an outdoor cat, living most of her life on our front porch. Leah felt sorry for her a few days ago and let her stay inside. Leah had gone to bed, but I was still up when Chloe got the walkies. She ended up in our bathroom throwing up on a rug. Then she threw up in the living room. It was mostly water.

And then she got a urinary tract infection. She used to be a small cat, but now she’s just a bony memory of herself. The vet weighed her when we took her in for treatment. She had lost a pound in about a month, which doesn’t seem too bad, but it was about 25 percent of her body weight. She might disappear before she dies. I think in either case it won’t be too long. .

We don’t want to let here suffer. Our problem is that cats don’t show their pain. We have to try to read her body language when she’s trying her best not to say anything.

Dusty

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We had to put our cat Dusty down Wednesday evening.

Dusty showed up at our previous house sometime around 2006 with his mother and two siblings. We gave one of the siblings away, but ended up keeping two. The trio became Chloe, the mother; Rusty, the sister; and Dusty, the brother. Rusty died a few years ago from feline immunodeficiency virus.

Dusty was diagnosed with lymphoma last week. His mother Chloe had been diagnosed with the same disease a couple of months ago. She had been eating like a pig but losing weight. The vet gave her a steroid injection, and it helped tremendously. She got a second shot just a couple of weeks ago. And then we noticed Dusty was not eating well, so we took him in. Same disease, and same shot. But the shot did not work for Dusty. A couple of days ago he became lethargic and refused his food. It got worse. On Thursday it was bad enough that we were going to take him to the vet, but I was tied up taking my aunt to the dentist. It was too late to take him in that day.

We considered taking him to the emergency veterinary clinic Tuesday night, but held off. Then Wednesday he was even worse. A doctor’s appointment kept us from taking him our vet, so we took him to the emergency clinic around 7 pm. After the examined him, they told us he was in the process of dying. We already knew that. So we made the only decision we could.

Dusty was probably the most even-tempered of all our cats. He tended to mind his own business. He didn’t roam, and he almost never had disagreements with the other cats. He was a little timid around me, less so around Leah. Like most cats, he spent a lot of time napping.

Sometimes he slept on the top step.

Sometimes his choices of places to nap and napping posture were comical.

His relationship with his mother was reasonably close.

This was taken a few years ago. More recently they tended to sleep in separate houses. A few days ago Chloe started sleeping with him again. Leah thinks Chloe knew something was wrong with Dusty.

We brought his little wasted body home, but it was too late to bury him. Tomorrow afternoon, after the rain stops, I’ll put him near Zeke and Lucy.

We know that Chloe will follow before too long. She’s doing pretty well now, but lymphoma is a death sentence.

Someone said snow

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Quick! There are two loaves left!

In these parts, when someone says, “snow”, everyone instinctively heads to the grocery store and buys bread and milk, and the Atlanta TV weather forecasters said the word. So, that’s what the bread section looked like at our local Walmart when we went there Friday night. After my peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch on Friday, I was down to one slice of bread, so I legitimately needed another loaf of bread. I don’t know how that happened, since loaves of bread typically have an even number of slices, and all of my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches consist of two slice of bread sandwiching peanut butter and jelly. You are welcome to count the slices of bread in any new loaf you have, but if you find an odd number, don’t call me. Report a defective loaf to the manufacturer.

To be honest, there are lot of other places in the store where the shelves are pretty sparsely stocked, but not because of impending snowy doom. It’s just the way things are today. We have been looking for several days for our cats’ favorite canned food (salmon pate with extra gravy), but the cat food shelves have been essentially empty since at least Wednesday. I would insert a photo of the canned cat food shelves I texted to Leah on Wednesday to show her the pitiful state of canned cat food in America today, but it looks pretty much like the photo of the bread shelves, so just refer back to the top of this post.

To be honest, on Friday night one of the store employees went to the stock rooms in the back of the store and brought out a case of our cats’ favorite food, so they are in no danger of starving.

To be honest, our cats were not really in danger of starving. We had plenty of dry food and at least some canned food already. I don’t know what other cat owners will be serving their cats over the weekend. Snow, I guess.

To be honest, when it comes to empty bread shelves, there were a few of the more seedy, grainy types of bread to the left of these shelves. Those are the type that no one wants during a snow disaster, and they are the type that I usually buy, so I can have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch on Saturday. And so, with salmon pate with extra gravy and a loaf of bread, we are ready for the blizzard.

To be honest, we aren’t going to get a blizzard. There really is going to be snow, along with potentially ice, Saturday night and Sunday, mainly in the northeastern part of the state, where the mountains are higher and the air is colder. Road crews from Atlanta northeastward are busy scurrying around spraying the highways with salt in preparation for frozen precipitation. Here in the northwest corner of the state, we are at the boundary between nothing and a dusting. We will not get salty roads, but we are not worried. We are expected to get strong winds, which might blow over a few trees, possibly causing a power outage for us, so we might still freeze to death, even without snow.

To be honest, we will not freeze, unless it gets very cold and the cold weather lasts for a long time, because we have a wood-burning stove with about a week’s worth of dry firewood. But if the power outage lasts for more than a week, we might still freeze to death.

To be honest, we are unlikely to freeze to death even then, because there is more firewood around our property that I can get fairly easily, for some values of “easily”, and it is highly unlikely that it will stay that cold for that long. If it does stay that cold for that long, it is probably the end of the world, so maybe freezing to death would be a better choice than seeing what comes after the end of the world.

Although, to be honest, the end of the world might not look a lot different from the way it looks right now.

The stray, Mollie in bed, and me in the front

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The stray cat, which, in looking back at some texts, I realize has been around since February, is still visiting our front porch. I managed to shoot him with my phone on Monday.

He, or she, as the case may be, was watching for a chance to eat. Chloe, on the left, didn’t know the stray was there. Dusty was sound asleep.

Here’s an enlarged image.

Cute little kitty, right? But mean little kitty, too. It jumped on Mollie Tuesday afternoon. I saved Mollie by shouting at the cat, which does not stay around if a human appears. Mollie did not seem grateful, or at least any more grateful than any other cat has ever been.

One of our neighbors said the cat has been eating her cats’ food. It certainly looks well fed. Leah had been worried that someone dumped the cat because it was pregnant. We haven’t been able to get a close enough look to tell its sex, but it has been around long enough that if it had been pregnant, it would have already had its litter. So far the stray has not brought a tiny kitten around for us to admire, and we sincerely hope that does not happen.

Speaking of Mollie, which I was doing earlier, she has found a new place to sleep.

This is typical cat behavior; if a cat sees a horizontal surface, it will sleep on it. It’s better if it’s a soft surface, but that’s not necessary.

Mollie has been pulling the curtain around herself so she can pretend that no one knows where she is. Sam pays Mollie no attention.

This is the dogs’ bed. Sam sleeps there, but Zoe does not. Zoe sleeps at the foot of our bed, which does not please Leah.

On the human side of the household, I had my fourth session of physical therapy on Tuesday. I think I’m making reasonable progress with my knee and my shoulder. The real news, though, is that I rode home from PT in the front seat of our car.

For the last five or six weeks I have had to sit sideways in the back seat with my right leg extended across the seat. I had to approach the door backwards, then slide across the seat because I couldn’t bend my right knee far enough to get into the the front. At first I had to let Leah pick up my leg so I could slide into the car. I had reached the point that I could lift my leg all by myself, and pull myself across the seat using the grab handle on the opposite side of the car. I was feeling pretty good about my new skill at entering a car, but I decided to try the front seat on Tuesday. I managed to get my right leg bent far enough to get into the car, and there was plenty of room to stretch my legs out almost fully. I’ll never ride in the back seat again.

The surgeon had let me have 30 degrees of motion on my knee brace last week. That and some new but limited flexibility made the difference in getting into the front seat. I am scheduled to see the surgeon again Wednesday of next week, when he has promised to give me 70 degrees of motion. I can’t actually bend my knee that much right now, but maybe with enough PT I will be able to by then. And that will make getting into the car even easier.

And soon after that, I hope, I will be able to drive again.