elfs | Entries tagged with cats

Murder victim

I'm not sure if this will reveal that Omaha and I are monsters or not, but yesterday we watched our cats play catch-and-release with a small rabbit over and over again. It was horrifying in that way that cats are: they're little murder machines that, even when well-fed, enjoy torturing small animals for the sheer practice of doing so. Sienna, the younger and larger cat, had caught the poor beast, which screamed with this high-pitched, repeating pattern over and over whenever she had it in her mouth, and kept dragging it back to the yard to show Necco. We didn't try to stop them.

Sienna with her new "toy."

Sienna would let it go, and when it tried to run away she would catch it with almost contemptuous ease, drag it back, and let it go again.

Necco, the older cat, would sometimes come in and stalk and pretend to pounce, never quite landing on the creature. It would bound away and Necco would catch it. Eventually, thankfully, the creature did get away, or at least the next time we looked the cats were no longer playing with it and there was no sign of a body or blood. Part of me is grateful. Part of me is disappointed: our neighborhood has a serious rabbit problem, and there's no funding to deal with it at all, and we're all annoyed by just how many of them there are, and there's only one way to deal with them and it isn't any prettier than what the cats intended.

Master and Apprentice

Current Mood: distressed

It has now been more than three weeks since Bosco went missing on August 9th. Either he's landed somewhere with someone who is feeding him, and who has not taken him to the vet, or... well.

Dinah was an indoor cat for much of her life, especially at night. Bosco was a nighttime kitty, often not coming back until two or three AM, once he'd figured out that we'd always let him in if he did come back.

Two other cats from the neighborhood have gone missing in the past two years, too. Something about the woods behind my house, possibly even that damned raccoon, has been killing cats at an alarming rate.

I couldn't sleep well, partly out of thinking about this. It's why I'm blogging at 5am. Necco senses something is wrong, because she's not sleeping in anyone's bed anymore, preferring the living room couch. When Bosco would sleep at my feet, she'd sleep at Omaha's. Unless Storm was at her mother's house, then she'd take Storm's bed over and peer down at Kouryou-chan in the lower bunk all night long.

Damn.

Current Mood: sad

Bosco

One of the things we had to deal with when we got home was the news that Bosco has gone missing. With both the family gone and her maintaining a much different feeding schedule due to her staying up late and waking much later than the cats are used to, he must have wandered off.

I don't know where he is and I'm heartbroken by this. Necco's a nice cat and all, but Bosco was Dad's cat, by popular agreement, and even he seemed to appreciate my attention above everyone else's. He's been gone for over a week now. We've put up signs, and he is chipped, but so far, nothing.

There was a small black cat dead in the road at other end of the subdivision yesterday morning. I keep worrying something like that happened to him, or that damned raccoon, or he got into some poison someone set out for the raccoon or the rats or whatever. I imagine the worst.

Damn.

Current Mood: sad
Current Music: Tron OST, The Game Has Changed

I went up to lunch, and found Bosco all cuddled up with his favorite blanket. Despite yesterday being America's Independence day, known to cats across the continent as "Scary Boom Boom Nightmare Day," he still took up his usual corner of the bed by my feet and slept through the night. Must have been rough, because come lunch he's sacked out on the bed again.

The tassle between his paws is super-cute.

Current Mood: bored
Current Music: Platypus, Better Left Unsaid

The Watchout

You'd never know it from looking at this photograph, but these two rompers spend their days wrestling endlessly, trying to prove their dominance.

When we first got him, Boscoe (the orange male) was a skinny, weak rescue cat with little energy and no trust. The trust has come in after a month of living with us, and so has the energy. Despite a level of finickiness much higher than that of Necco (the grey female), he's put on a significant amount of weight, most of it muscle, and his coat has built up impressively. He's a gorgeous cat caught between a need to seem haughty and a neurotic desire for affection.

Necco, on the other hand, has no such neuroses. She's a tiny bundle of energy, leaping from beds and windowsills, pouncing without warning and generally causing great chaos. She's also an eager tunneler, burying herself under any blanket or sheet she can find. Last night, I got the cold nose treatment between my nethers at about 3am. Grr.

Still, other than a stubborn respiratory infection in Necco, both of them are healthy and settled in.

Current Mood: giggly

We buried Dinah this morning, after Omaha came home from her business trip. It was a quiet ceremony. I'd dug a hole in the back yard, four feet deep, and taken the little cardboard coffin out and put in in the living room with the little altar we'd set up-- candle, photo, her toys, things like that.

Our friend Rhea came over and helped, since she knows more about ritual than I do about programming, and after a respectful time where everyone said their last wishes for her, we all petted the body one last time. Kouryou-chan commented on how cold she felt-- well, she'd been in the freezer since Tuesday. Dinah looked so peaceful like that, curled up, and I felt so sad, because I knew she wasn't going to wake up, and that just hurt me so much.

We buried her in the back yard, and said goodbye, and... that was that. I'm such a sentimental wreck.

Current Mood: sad

After Kouryou-chan was born, we did the very middle class thing and found a larger home in a reasonable school district. This was good for Kouryou-chan: the house was finally big enough to encourage her to try and walk-- the apartment was so small she didn't need to crawl anywhere to see everything. Dinah, however, was now well into her middle age and settled and the change was a bit much for her.

The second day we moved into the new house, Dinah ran out the back door and disappeared into the wooded area behind the property. Omaha and I had no idea what had happened to her, and we were worried. We called to her all the time, left out her food by the back door, and waited.

She showed up a day and a half later. She seemed to be okay, very meowy but otherwise unharmed. We cuddled her and fed her and were very grateful to have her back.

Two days later, I was petting Dinah when my hand came back wet. The wetness was clear but smelled unpleasant, so I laid Dinah down on the couch and checked her over. There was a nasty, suppurating wound on her neck. "Omaha," I said, "There's a hole in our cat!"

We had an adventure finding a 24-hour emergency veterinarian. The one we found, Emerald, was way up in Seattle proper, a 45-minute drive. We made it, and left Dinah in their care. The next day, five hundred dollars later, Dinah was returned to us, half her neck and shoulder shaved and a huge, Frankensteinian stitch holding closed a three-inch long wound.

The fur took a long time to grow back, and I used to joke that she had a zipper for her pop-top head. Dinah was much more cautious about going outside after that; the greenbelt behind my house was actual forest, and populated with a few racoons.

Current Mood: sad

Omaha and I were lazing in bed one morning when Dinah leapt up onto it. I started petting her casually, like I always did every morning, when I realized that my hand was coming back wet. Puzzled, I reached over and turned on the light.

Not only was my hand wet, but the wetness was red. "Omaha," I said. She mumbled something, and I said, "Omaha, wake up! Dinah's covered in blood!"

"What?" She was up quickly, and looking at my hand and the trail Dinah was leaving behind, she agreed with my assessment that the cat was, indeed, covered with bright red blood. After checking Dinah over thoroughly we felt confident that it was not her blood, so now the question became: what had she hunted that had so much blood, and where was the body? We followed the trail out the hallway, but it seemed to fade the further it got from the bedroom. There were two trails, getting heavier as they headed into the bedroom: one led up to the bed, the other led under a table set up in the corner. "I know what it is," Omaha said.

An examination of the box showed that she did, indeed, know what it was. Dinah had jumped into a box of theatrical supplies and overturned a jar full of stage blood. That was why it was all over her belly, and why she was leaving the trails that she was.

Cleaning it up was disgusting and difficult. For one thing, the blood had dried out overnight and gelatinized into the brown carpet. The only way to clean it out was to pour boiling water onto it, then sop up the liquified mess with whatever towels we had lying around. The towels got tossed into bathtub.

Cleaning the cat was a challenge. This was when the Internet was young, and I couldn't ask google "How do you convince a cat to hold still for a washing?" We had a shower massage, of course, but Dinah was one miserable cat and I had quite the scratch along the inside of my right arm when we finally got the sugary, but probably not safe-to-lick-off, stage blood out of her fur.

By the time we were done, we had one very upset but clean cat, one bathtub that looked like a grisly murder scene, and a spot on the floor a brighter red than all the rest of the carpeting.

Current Mood: sad

Omaha and I moved to a different apartment, a few blocks away. It was a nicer place, far quieter, and with better neighbors. Dinah adjusted quickly enough to it.

One evening, when Omaha and I were making love, Dinah leapt up onto the bed to see what the featherless apes were doing. She wandered across the vigorous Elf and onto the bedstand, swishing her tail lazily through the candle.

"The cat!" I gasped, hearing a sizzle and seeing this out of the corner of my eye. "The cat! On fire! The Cat! Is! On! Fire!" I immediately disengaged from the task at hand, grabbed the throw blanket and the protesting Dinah and balled her up in it to smother the flames.

I unwrapped her and saw that the flames had been put out. Dinah was miffed, looking up at me with the most wounded dignity a cat can manage. She sniffed at her tail momentarily, puzzled, then went on her way as if nothing untoward had happened.

Omaha and I did not manage to find the mood again that night.

Current Mood: sad

When Dinah was young, she loved to hunt, and Omaha and I routinely chose neighborhoods where she'd have that opportunity. It's not hard to find even modestly priced neighborhoods with large swaths of at least green if not forested land around here. Delridge is a run-down neighborhood, and the hilly land makes development painful, so it's still got its share of hillsides covered in bush and tree.

Dinah brought home large bugs, snakes, and mice from time to time. Omaha once found a garden snake that had somehow escaped into the (then unused) fireplace. Dinah was on one side of the spark grill, and the snake on the other, and they were eyeing each other warily. The snake had a nasty gash along its side.

Dead mice she would leave on the doorstep. Live mice she would bring inside, play with for a while, and then ignore, leaving it up to Omaha and I to chase the poor critters out.

The worst was the mole. Remember that casement window I wrote about? Dinah caught a mole right outside that window and began to torture the poor beast with all the ferocity an adult cat can muster. The screams were horrendous. High pitched squealing that went on and on, a voice that truly screamed "Halp! She's murdering me!" I still hear that poor mole sometimes, in my nightmares.

Current Mood: sad

When Dinah first moved in with us, it wasn't all wonderful. She didn't know what to make of her new surroundings and her new owners. She seemed fine for the first couple of weeks.

Our apartment at the time was on a very busy arterial, four lanes plus a turn lane, leading off the freeway and past the steel plant up into the heart of the Delridge district. Across the street from us was a multipurpose office building most notable for the big sign outside that read "Kidney Center." Dinah decided one day to try and cross that street.

Omaha and I didn't know this, mind you. We just knew that Dinah had gone missing. We were upset; we'd lost another cat that way, he just disappeared one night-- although Omaha has suspicions that a neighbor killed Hershey because we'd called in a noise complaint on a drunken, rowdy party several nights before that. But we had no such neighbor problems at the old Delridge apartment. Dinah was just gone.

A few days later I was walking home from the bus stop, up the other side of the road. I heard a familiar meow come from the bushes of the Kidney Center, and I looked over and there was Dinah, looking very cold and lost. "Dinah?" She meowed and took a step toward me, tentatively. I think she still was unclear on the concept of me as her caretaker.

I grabbed her and wrapped her in the windbreaker I was wearing and ran across the street shouting, "Omaha! Open the door! Open the door!" I must have sounded hysterical but then I'd just rescued our lost cat, so maybe I was a bit.

We were so grateful to have her home, and she was grateful to be home. And the street was another thing she never tried again. I think she was happier with the vast field of brambles behind the apartment anyway.

Current Mood: sad

Omaha and I got Dinah back in early 1993 or so, from our friend Indra, who gave us this little black furball about two and a half years old. Dinah moved in with us when we had a very small apartment. At the time, she was an outdoor cat, spry enough to leap up onto the kitchen counter and then out the window over the sink, so we didn't have a problem keeping her box clean. She still had one, in the back of the closet opposite the kitchen, but she almost never used it except in winter when the door was closed.

The apartment had no screens over the windows, which swung out from casements along the top. Dinah could leap three or four feet at a time, and got it into her head one day that she could leap out the bedroom windows just as readily as she could the kitchen.

The building is on a very steep slope-- such that the kitchen was sunk into the hillside and the kitchen casement window, on the outside, was about knee-high. The bedroom windows, on the other hand, were almost ten feet off the ground.

Omaha heard a loud sound from the bedroom, and went to go look. She didn't see anything odd, so she called out, wondering if it was the cat. "Dinah? Dinah?"

She said she heard the most pitiful "Meow?" sound come from outside the window. She looked out the window and found Dinah hanging from the windowshade cord; it had gotten caught around her haunches and she was just dangling from it, staring down at the ground very far away, looking very pitiful.

Omaha jumped up onto the hood of my car to reach Dinah and disentangle her. The cat was none the worse for it, but she never jumped out that window again.

Current Mood: sad

Dinah

Dinah passed away this evening at about 6:00pm.

We took her to the vet because her inability to eat was becoming much more serious. She had a growth under her tongue that was making it impossible for her to eat, and Dr. Emily said that with the kidney and neurological damage she'd already suffered, our alternatives were to either put her down, or let her starve to death. We could have intubated her, I guess, but that's not... it just didn't seem right. Omaha and I talked it over and decided it was time.

I blogged back in March of last year the sense of caretaker's guilt I felt sometimes wondering when Dinah was going to die and when I could stop the heroic efforts of watering her and prepping her meds every night and all the rituals that went into caring for a geritric cat. The doctor had said she had six to eight months; she lasted 22 months. The past two weeks had been hard for her, the decline rapid and painful to watch.

I miss her already. Kouryou-chan said she'd never seen me cry before. We walked in the door and I wondered where Dinah was, why wasn't she at the top of the stairs complaining that I hadn't petted her yet. Then I remembered that her body is in a box outside in the deep freezer, awaiting burial, and her spirit has moved on to somewhere else.

I'm still fighting the tears. It's still hard. I loved the burning cat, the bloody cat, and the cat with the pop-top head, and I miss her terribly.

Current Mood: sad

Dinah was so anxious to go outside this morning, so Omaha and I decided to let her out. It was before the rains had started to fall, and it was her first major attempt to go outdoors since snow had fallen at all.

She leapt at the open door, and immediately regretted it. She pulled up her left paw and shook it with a "What the heck?" reaction. Another step, and she shook her right rear paw. Then her front right. Then her rear left. It was very funny in a take-comfort-in-the-misery-of-others way. Omaha told her, "There's no grass out there honey. Why don't you come back inside?"

She took five more steps, then immediately turned around and ran back inside. She meowed loudly, "Make that stuff go away!" Sorry, cat, we'll just have to wait.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Canterbury Organ & Chimes, Carol of the Bells

Geriatric cat care

When we set out camping, we had to contract with a pet sitting service to take care of Dinah. Our old service had folded, so we found someone else local at Little Furry Things and a young woman there named Jill. She came out the day before and I like her, walked her through the set-up and showed her how we water the cat.

The basics are simple: Dinah gets one pill each from the little containers on the left, one for her blood pressure and one for acid reflux. For the sitter, the pills were pre-filled into pillpockets, little meaty things that are apparently shelf-stable for a while at room temperature.

After the pills, she gets watered. After swapping the needle on the line of lactated Ringer's solution, she gets approximately 100ml of water under the skin every night. I try to make it less uncomfortable by pre-warming the Ringer's in a tub of warm water and lying her on a towel, and she tolerates it very well.

She gets two food packets a day plus a half-cup of dry food (not shown), and we have to rotate her diet because even with the acid reflux pills she sometimes gets nauseous and decides she's not going to eat anything that smells like what she just ate. Rotating her diet prevents her from remembering what made her nauseous, so she'll eat day after day. Eventually the memory of what ailed her fades, and we have just enough varieties to accomodate that.

Jill is local to Burien and areas around here, and having a stranger come into your house and care for your cat can be a strange sensation, but she did great. She was a little more expensive than our previous sitter at $36/hour for about one hour every day, but worth it for peace of mind and Dinah's comfort while we were gone.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Biosphere, Microgravity

Last night, after I'd drugged, watered, and fed my cat Dinah, she came and sat next to me, climbing quite noisily up the arm of the chair to lean over my shoulder and breathe her "oceanfish and chicken" combo on me. She started to make the oddest sounds, a deep, hacking kind of sneezing sound. "Are you okay?" I asked her. She ignored me and continued what limited grooming she can acheive despite her arthritis.

Later, after Omaha and I had gone to bed, she climbed into bed with us, and again began making that sound. Only this time, it was louder, more pronounced, and it was accompanied by a mixture of coughing and what sounded like gagging. "Is she having trouble breathing?" Omaha asked as I fumbled for the small light on the bedstand next to me.

Dinah was sitting on the bed down by our feet, batting at her own face with her paw. "What's that?" Omaha asked.

"What's what?"

"On her face right there! What is that?"

In the dim light it was difficult but I could see something just next to Dinah's nose, stuck to her face. Omaha grabbed her head and I tried to grasp whatever it was in my fingers. It took three tries, but finally I got it. Dinah let out a soft, high-pitched mewl as I extracted a nine centimeter long blade of grass that was embedded deep in her sinus and down her throat, causing her distress.

Grief, that was disgusting. Even worse, I suspect she ate some grass, threw it up, and one blade went into the wrong pipe on the way up and has been working its way to the point where it was prominent enough for us to get it.

"I guess these monkey paws are good for something, huh?" I told her as Omaha petted her for comfort. She gave me her best old-kitty sneer as we went back to bed.

Current Mood: nauseated
Current Music: Lunacy, Sacred Bitch

It was a quiet weekend otherwise here at the Villa Sternberg. I took the girls to minature golf and played 18 holes: Kouryou-chan, who used to beat everyone, has now fallen into third place, with Yamaraashi-chan in second. I totally nailed the reciped for waffles this morning; they were crispy outside, fluffy inside, and wonderful with melted butter.

I suppose it's just too late to worry about Dinah. She's responding adequately to hydration therapy, but she's still losing weight. For a brief while after the dental surgery she was eating heartily, but it has tapered off again and now she's losing weight again. We've got her on a combination of anti-nausea and hunger-promotion drugs, but they don't seem to be doing very much for her. The return of her favorite cat food doesn't seem to stimulate her very much, either.

The girls have been pretty good all weekend. Having a working calendar system in the house has helped a lot. I use one of those big four month calendars and a dozen ultra-fine-point dry erase markers. That seems to settle any questions about what's happening on any given day.

Current Mood: tired

Dinah Kitty

Ever since the food recall, Dinah (The Bloody Cat™, The Burning Cat™, Frankenkitty™, The Cat With the Pop-Top Head™) has been off her feed. We've been worried about her, because a cat her size is supposed to be eating between six and eight ounces of food a day, but she's been eating less than two daily. We've tried everything, gone through two dozen different brands, refreshed her water more than twice a day. She's lost a lot of weight in the past three months.

We took her to the vet twice in that period, and both times the vet said, "It's probably the feed. Cats her age are picky. Just keep trying." So we did. We've found that she likes chunky food, and she's big on poultry. We're using some high-end brands now.

On her second trip to the vet (after Dinah had what looked to Omaha's inexperienced eye like a seziure) (remember, Omaha's only ever seen one seziure: I've seen over thirty) they took blood samples and the results came back. We got them yesterday.

Dinah's not eating because she has elevated stomach acid, which means that eating gives her nausea. Surprisingly enough, there's a cure for that: Pepcid AC, 1/4 tablet a day. But elevated stomach acid in a sixteen-year-old cat happens because the kidneys are no longer removing from the bloodstream the hormone that causes stomach acid production.

Dinah has early-stage chronic renal failure. The veternarian said she has between six months and a year, maybe two if we were aggressive about it. It's one of those things where you have to question just what you're after: the cat's comfort as geriatric decrepitude starts to take her, or putting off your own pain of her mortality as long as possible.

To our relief, Dinah took well to the kidney diet; a low-acid, low-protein, high-potassium diet. She's always tolerated medicines well, and I'm dissolving the Pepcid in a syringe and shooting it down her throat so she can't easily retch it if she's feeling nauseus. We're having to alternate the kidney-diet food with a high-fat food that taxes her kidneys but now that the acid-blocker is working she needs to put some weight back on. We also bought her a water recirculater that aerates and filters her drinking water, since she needs more water to push wastes through her failing kidneys.

Omaha and I have had Dinah longer than we've had the kids: since 1992. She's a wonderful cat, tolerant, loving, sometimes desperately needy for touch. I'm just not handling this well; I get teary when I think about it too much. And, grief, what am I gonna tell the kids?

Current Mood: sad
Current Music: Porcupine Tree, Rainy Taxi