belmikey, posts by tag: cats - LiveJournal

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"True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And, being anger'd, puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south."

It is but five weeks since the two cats who came to us named "Night" and "Prince" came into our home. Night was the older of the two, but not by much. He quickly proved the more elusive as well, continuing to prefer to hide and den out of sight while "Prince", younger, only just coming into his adolescence, began to frolic in his new territory.

It is only slightly less than that when we had one fortunate night where we were able to pry "Night" out of hiding (for he was still so named) and I was able to convince him to stay on my lap for most of an evening. And only four weeks since we decided that, if the one cat was a prince, he must be Tybalt, and chose to name "Night" Mercutio.

Since that lucky night, alas, we saw little of Mercutio. Occasional glimpses of him in his favorite hiding places, but little more, until this last week, when he began to show himself more frequently.

Then yesterday, my joy at seeing him out when I went to shower in the morning turned to ashes as I realized that he had that thinness cats get when they have not been eating, and that he was audibly wheezing.

Today, Pixel took him to the vet -- those of you who read LJ earlier have already seen that part, and the rest can go read it easily enough, so I shan't reiterate and instead will cut directly to the end.

Mercutio had a large mass on his kidney, and an almost non-existent white blood cell count. Although the vet did no exploratory biopsy, she was fairly certain that the mass was malignant, and that both the mass and the depressed white count were both attributable to active Feline Leukaemia.

Now, this is not a surprise. Both boys came to us FeLV+. We specifically adopted them because they were FeLV+, as our older cat Nina is. But we've been so lucky with Nina, who has remained firmly healthy, that we had hopes.

Now, at least for Mercutio, those hopes were dashed. There was nothing to be done that wouldn't simply prolong suffering.

And so, Mercutio, who was bidding for the role of Patron Cat of Ninjas, and who somehow claimed my heart despite such miniscule acquaintence, has gone to hunt with Bast.

Goodbye Mercutio. Thanks for being our cat. I only wish we'd had more time.

Charlie the Panda Cat, the Holstein Cat, the Kitler, the Cat Without a Secret Agent Alias, and the patron cat of supervision, with his inky spots and dog-like tendency to wag his tail, has gone to hunt with Bast.

Thanks for being our cat, Charlie. Good hunting!

Stop getting terminally ill before your time!

No, really. Stop it.

/m

ETA: No, nothing new, except we have a preliminary prognosis from the oncologist for Charlie, and it's double-plus ungood.

When our cat Hurricane Iniki, and then six months later, our cat Chornaya Koshka, each became ill and eventually had to be put down a few years back, I posted pretty extensively, from the moment we found out each one was sick until we put them down, and indeed, afterward. Heck, for Iniki, I even was inspired to write a poem, which still never fails to make me cry, notwithstanding that it's my own work.

ANYway, I haven't been nearly so forthcoming about what's going on right now with Charlie. Some of that is that I don't share nearly as much as I used to, in general. Some of it is that I've simply never been as attached to either of our current cats; indeed, I'm not sure I will ever allow myself to become as attached to an animal as I did to Koshka and Iniki.

However, the fact remains that there is news, and it is bad.

For those of you who aren't also followers of Pixel's LJ, a summary: Charlie has been losing weight. A lot of weight. More than mere exercise can easily explain. And then, more recently, he began hiding a lot. Pixel took him to the vet, where they discovered an intestinal blockage, which we at first treated as severe constipation. When the drugs for that failed to clear his system, they did an x-ray, which turned up a tumor.

(Why didn't they do an x-ray to start with? Because they'd only just done x-rays last year, when he had swallowed some string, and everything then looked fine).

The tumor was removed and he's been home recuperating (albeit deeply offended by the Cone of Shame that prevents him from chewing on his incision) and generally seeming more chipper, since he can now eat and drink and eliminate more or less normally.

However...the biopsy on that tumor has come back. It's aggressive, and probably already metastasized into his lymphatic system. We are still waiting to hear back from the oncologist about possible treatments and prognoses.

Based on what happened with Iniki, however, I'm not expecting any good news at all from this point forward.

More as it happens.

Techblog site LifeHacker has a request line, which apparently frequently gets requests for kittens for some reason.

Apparently the nice folks at LH decided they were tired of such requests and asked people to stop. Suddenly, their request-line rate dropped like a stone, demonstrating that clearly, their audience needs more kittens.

Here's what they posted in response to this obvious demand...

http://www.lifehacker.com/software…

One of the reasons I so loved Chornaya Koshka was that she had, almost from the moment she entered our home, an absolutely unerring sense of when Mikey needed a cat on his lap.

It's a gift not all cats have. Some cats (like Charlie) are really not lap cats. Some cats (like Iniki) are generally happy to be scooped up, but are not necessarily going to home in on your vibes and snuggle your mood into submission.

But Koshka knew, almost every time.

Now it must be admitted that, until recently, I haven't really thought of Nina and Charlie as "my" cats. They live here, they're welcome, I enjoy their presence in my home...but I just didn't feel anything like the same sort of bond. They were roommates, not family.

But this morning, I awoke in a Mood™, my mind stuck in a loop of irritable and irritating and irrational thought, one of those thought-loops that are based on nothing real and yet cannot simply be dispelled at will.

And then I sat down to surf after my morning ablutions, and Nina appeared. And did not merely offer her company, she demanded it, firmly asserting that Mikey Needed Purring, Now. Even as I type this, she is sitting on my chest, paws and head on my shoulder, lightly purring.

Life is good.

I should be doing stuff.

I planned to do stuff. At least some writing. In fact, I hope I still will.

But right now, there's a purring cat curled up on my chest who is quite insistent that ambition is overrated, and that my mere human plans will have to await her pleasure.

So, at about 3am I woke up (end of cycle, I think) and heard New Cat singing a bit. Went to check on her, gave her some scritchies...didn't pull the door taught enough behind me as I went back to bed...

Koshka got in about 3 minutes later.

Cue surprised-angry-territorial-noises. We're not actually sure which one of them was making them -- one pissed off cat sounds like another. pixel39 and I both got out of bed at that point, but Pixel beat me to it. Koshka left the room as soon as Pixel showed up.

So at any rate, Koshka now knows there's another cat in the house. She's been ignoring the studio since, but this morning she came in an snuggled up with me while I was still wearing the CPAP, which she never does -- I get the distinct impression that the CPAP disturbs her, because she has largely avoided me while I'm sleeping since I started using it. So I think it's registered in her tiny, tiny brain that there's another cat in the house.

I checked in on nova katino again this morning. 'Friendly' only begins to scratch this cat's surface. Despite her scare last night, she was very pleased to see me. I scooped her up and the purring started mid-air. She's already eating (one piece of food at a time -- then she gets distracted!). Basically, as far as the studio's concerned, she's perfectly at home already.

Not sure when we'll start trying to acclimate her to the rest of the house...and start allowing the territory games to begin...

Some weeks ago, as some of you know, our friend Tara had a young cat turn up near her farm, having fairly obviously been dumped there. We offered to adopt her, but when we took her to the vet, she turned up weakly positive for FeLuk. Our friend Melissa agreed to foster her until a retest could be done.

The retest aslo came up weakly positive, but this time they also performed a marrow test, and that came up negative. This meant that, yes, she had been exposed and was fighting it off, but it had not yet reached the marrow, which meant it COULD be fought off.

Today...she tested clean. She's currently ensconsed in the studio with her own litter box, food, water, and toys, acclimatising to our house.

Koshka hasn't noticed, yet...