Escapist cat tales

I've taken control of house's Windows laptop to start with something apolitical and modest. I would likely give myself apoplexy if I resumed with anything political.

For those who missed the news, Mr. Spike, our cat of 12 years, died in his sleep November 14. His rapid decline settled the question of his illness--lymphoma vs. IBD--in favour of the former. He clearly had neurological metastases. Had he lived a few hours longer, it would only have been to take the last trip to the vet's. For a cat who hated vets with a snapping, slashing passion it was only justice that he could choose a box to hide in and check out on his own schedule.

All right for him, but it is still a jolt to be the one to find the body.

It didn't take long for the next awkward act of the tale to come onstage. My wife, who had said she wanted to hold out until she had retired and could have a dog, reversed herself and wanted a cat: now.
I found that hasty, what with the turmoil of Christmas facing us, and the subsequent turmoil of plumbers in the house. Further, in searching so soon I rather felt like someone whose coffee-maker had burnt out and was driven to replace it at once.

No matter. She and my daughter went online to search for a shelter cat. As usual, this could not be an ordinary shelter cat. It had to be one who appeared to be unadoptable. Spike, for instance, was the runt of his litter. At his best, he was a few pencils short of a box.

The women of the family targeted Cuddles, at a nearby shelter. Cuddles had had a difficult life in recent months, it said. Cuddles was a Maine coon cat. Cuddles looked cute.

We went for an introductory visit. Cuddles spent the entire visit either eying us from a cat perch across the room, or napping. On this slender evidence, and a written record that for me was far from encouraging, my wife decided Cuddles was the one.

I have to explain here that we have kept cats for over 40 years. We've had cats of widely varying personalities, and we know something about suitable protocols for introducing a cat to a new house.
We decided that my wife would go alone to adopt Cuddles, so as not to overwhelm her with new humans. I was out of the house when she returned, which is my bad, because I might have prevented what happened next. Instead of bringing Cuddles in the box up to the safe room we had set up, she lifted the cat box lid right inside the door in some sort of expansive "Be free! " gesture.

Cuddles bolted like greased lightning. I found her under the clawfoot tub. She slipped away from that and dove for the cellar.

Our house is about 115 years old. The foundation is fieldstone, and the cellar is rife with catly nooks and crannies. Cuddles soon vanished altogether. We would not have known she still existed, except for occasional visits to the litter box and rarer pauses to take a kibble or two from the food dish.

We began to think that she had somehow got outside. This meant we had the humiliation of reporting her AWOL to the adopting agency and the local animal control. We plastered the neighbourhood with lost cat posters. Two days later she had again used the litter box and left footprints as well as urine, proving she was inside. I began to think she was a cat from a parallel universe who had fallen back into her wormhole, which proved more true than I realised.

Eventually, we got the services of the shelter's premier lost cat recovery expert, who came over and pretty much turned the house inside out. While she found evidence of recent cat presence in a couple of cubbies, all of us wondered if she had gotten behind the insulating partitions inside the fieldstone. A great hypothesis, that, but it lacked evidence. The expert left, giving us a couple of tips on finding lost cats.

The next morning my wife tried one of them, sitting quietly on the cellar stairs and calling Cuddles. To her amazement the cat replied. They had an extended conversation without any human homing in. My wife thought the voice came from her right, and above. My daughter, who came in soon enough to hear all this, thought the sound came from behind the front partition, but again an examination showed nothing.

The cat whisperer came back. After a few minutes she asked whether the sound might possibly have some from outside. We doubted it, because we knew of no opening there that would allow the cat out.

I looked outside, all the same. To my surprise I found a woodchuck hole next to the foundation, under the front porch, and clearly leading into the fieldstone. When I had first opened the partition, I'd found loose dirt, but thought it had just come through the loose-laid stone. Two plus two seemed to equal a tunnel big enough for a cat to hide in.

I traded places with the shelter person and began to take the rest of the partition down with an electric screwdriver. I had just begun the third panel when Cuddles bolted out of the woodchuck hole and dove for cover. Fortunately, she chose a cul-de-sac, and the whisperer got her out and into the safe room.

Despite all this, Cuddles was only slightly dehydrated and not especially hungry. In the safe room she groomed, used the litter box, and began to show signs of plotting her next escape. Before we met her, Cuddles had had an eye infection, which ten days of stress had revived. We agreed that she should return to the shelter for a vet exam and treatment.

It is not clear just now whether she's coming back here. The escapade showed an unexpected taste for wild adventure, and two older people, still working, may not be able to keep the cork in this bottle. We're glad she's found, though. The Christmas season was beginning to look rather bleak.

Regardless of the outcome, I think we'll rank Cuddles as our seventh cat. Should she not return, we wish her the best. We also wish her a large modern home filled with very athletic people and predictable places to hide.

Meanwhile, Uncle has to try finding gravel in December and figure out how to fill this damned hole. A lost cat is one thing. A lost skunk would be far less entertaining.

Annie's Tale

The proper time to tell some stories is when they have come to an end. Our beautiful, tortoise shell, feral house guest, Annie, is gone. Our intention, and the vet's, had been that this very wild kitty should check out on her own terms. It proved to be impossible. Her decline had accelerated so much in the last fortnight that prolonging her life was just prolonging her pain.



The best estimate of her age is 24; 112 in human years. She first appeared in our lives in 1989, when a neighbour who fostered cats took in this youthful rescue cat. All any of us ever knew of her background was that Annie had had an exceptionally bad kittenhood. Beautiful as she was, Annie was totally wild, and remained so all her life. Our neighbour, who was very talented at gentling such animals, didn't succeed with Annie. A house with three young children, two dogs, and a traveling circus of smaller animals was not entirely to Annie's taste. She took off. She would take food and water from our neighbour's porch, but otherwise lived in the open space in the midst of our block. My daughter, who was friends with the daughter of that house, got to know Annie from these furtive porch visits. We would see her occasionally, crossing the back yard, and got used to her as a neighbourhood fixture.

Early in the winter of 2000-01, Annie began hanging out on our deck. We put out food and water, and I built her a small foam shelter. Our other cat, Spike, was still a kitten then. Bit by bit, the two cats bonded through the glass of our back slider. Finally, when a March snowstorm came, she looked interested in life on the other side of the glass. We opened the door, stepped quietly back, and Annie walked in. For a cat in her twelfth year, this was something like retirement.

Except for a day or two when we had a new furnace installed, she has been our guest ever since. As far as she was concerned, this was a strictly business proposition with the humans. For the first several years, with her joints and faculties intact, she wouldn't allow any human closer than about six feet. Any attempt to violate that space, and we learnt very fast how wild she really was. As Annie's eyesight and hearing began to fail, her perimeter of safety shrank, but contact remained off-limits.

The relationship with Spike was different. She had somehow established herself as dominant cat in their interactions through the glass. Although Spike could be macho, territorial and boorish, she still drew lines that he could not cross. Still, it was not until a few weeks ago that she had the satisfaction of knowing that he had finally figured out how to mouse.

Annie's world shrank with the decline in her faculties. For years, she had two vantage points: the cellar window of our front bay, and one of the ground floor windows of the same bay. For several years, she was such a fixture there that she developed a neighbourhood reputation as "the kitty in the window." Having come into the house when Em was already at college, she took Em's bedroom as her own, save when Em came home. As her eyesight, joints and coordination failed, she retreated one by one from her favourite spots, giving up the ground-floor windows only a few weeks ago.

Since then, she chiefly lived on the few square feet of floor inside the slider, the first view she had had of the home she chose. When she couldn't negotiate the cellar stairs, we brought up a litter box. When she couldn't climb into the litter box, we bought puppy pads. By then, it looked like it was time to take the exit decision out of Annie's paws.



She kept a measure of control to the end. Weak as she had become, she fought us when, for the first time in her life here, we put her into the cat box. She resisted the vet and the tech when it was time for the first, relaxing, shot, then leaped off the table when it had been administered. But her end came quietly and peacefully. Whatever in her first months had driven her to a lifetime of distance from the human race, fear that almost never yielded to love and care, was gone. We were finally able to pet this little lady in her final moments.

Recent studies in feline psychology have tended to the belief that cats experience something like grief when a companion is gone. This seems to be going on now. Spike has shown what seems to be the first stage of this: a restless prowling, mitigated somewhat by his understanding that he now gets all the food.

Spike is likely to remain an only cat. His welcome to strangers, ever since Annie came, has been rather sparse. That doesn't seem like a good thing to inflict on any shelter kitty.

The medical adventures of Mr Spike, part whatever

I've been so busy with doing the cat health thing that I haven't commented on it, so here's the update.

When we started this little adventure, the jury was split on Spike's diagnosis between lymphoma and inflammatory bowel disease. His course to date strongly indicates the latter: doesn't rule out lymphoma, but the door's open to a variety of other causes. Spike initially responded very well and very favourably to the prednisolone, applied in the outer ear twice daily.

That's the good news. As he grew stronger and put on weight, our sweet kitty (who has never liked being handled) began to register his objections with vigour. My wife had never responded well to aggressive behaviour, from two or four-legged beings. Not only did it become harder to get Spike to cooperate, it grew harder to get C to cooperate. The climax of this was an evening when she picked Spike up diffidently and carelessly, leaving herself vulnerable. Mr Nice Guy bit her, about as hard and deep as a male cat can. I suggested that she needed some topical antibiotics immediately. C resisted (sounds like the cat, eh?), with the result that the wounds became badly infected. She ended up at the local Walk-in clinic getting oral antibiotics and a good scolding.

What with all this, Spike's meds fell off from twice a day to twice a week. He began to decline quickly, indicated by a return to spectacular projectile vomiting...nearly everywhere. In itself, this is not home improvement, although the damage will likely lead to some home improvement. With my inquiring mind, I began to observe wads of plastic coming out with the puke. We went on plastic lockdown as well as returning to the proper medical regimen, to avoid adding to what seemed like a gut full of ill-gotten plastic gains. We've had to reduce his food intake, and we began to withdraw the foods that seemed to set him off more quickly. We are now delighting the local Petco by purchasing a variety of outre, and expensive, food for the sensitive kitteh tum. So far, he deals best with quail and chicken, and tonight duck is on the menu. I don't see why you can't get mouse and rat flavours: both are lean, high in protein and, obviously, the most natural of foods for cats.

All this is to be expected when one is the pet of a cat with IBD. Those who don't want health complications should either get a pet rock or a robot.

However, we take comfort in small things. We have had two days without projectile vomiting (not without vomiting: this is a cat, get real) and if we get through a third day, Mr Spike can have a few more calories. Probably not duck, though: that was not well received, and at $2 a mini-can I have a low tolerance for leftovers. By the way, the unopened food that doesn't work out goes to Friends of Marblehead's Abandoned Animals, supporters of our local no-kill shelter. Go thou and do likewise.

Beastliness

I have something else to say, but to start with: Blogger.com's upgrade sucks moose wang. I hate the idea of looking for a new online home, but this set of changes for the sake of change is among the most poorly thought-out upgrades ever executed. I feel evicted.

Meanwhile, let's start with the trials of Mr. Spike. the good news is that prednisolone has made a world of difference to our kitteh. When we got him on it, he was hardly eating at all, and that grudgingly. After three weeks of prednisolone gels applied to the inside of the ear, he's back to chomping down a cup or more of food daily. One begins to hope that inflammatory bowel disease, and not cancer, is the correct Dx.

Meanwhile. ancient Annie is not only blooming with the end of Spike's low-fat diet, she's actually growing pudgy. At 24, we can probably cut her some slack. The worst part of Spike's returning health is returning vigour. This is a cat, mind, who has always set limits on his hooman interaction. Being picked up has always been out of bounds. Hoomans messing with the sacred ears has been way out of bounds. Now, the price of survival is that he submit to both of these impositions twice a day. He doesn't like it, and he's getting strong enough to get his point across.

Well, cry me a fucking river, kitteh. One of my daily meds, Neurontin, is something like a partially-tamed wild horse. Most of the time, it quietly does its job. But sometimes, it will trot out one of the half page of side effects and
blindside you.

One of most singular is known to Neurontin users as "the goofies." It is a sense of disorientation, loss of focus and balance, that's rare (after a while) but totally random. The goofies came to visit today. It was as usual a few minutes before I realised what was happening. The disturbing part was that I was driving home from work at the time.

One puts up with this because of the benefits (so suck it up, Spike). This year, at least, the benefits include a winter breakthrough episode that only lasted four or five weeks. But as time goes by, Goofies are only one part of the price. The winter Beast was at least predictable. Lately, the visits are shorter, much shorter: sudden, random stabs that literally stop one in one's tracks, then subside. My homework tells me that a good many people with TN have similar experiences.

I feel Spike's pain, but with a smidge of impatience.

Feline Follow-up

I'm at work on another in the stupid hoomanz series, but occurred to me that some people who drop in here don't know what's up with Spike. Those who have heard of this (via FB) should have details.

Mr. Spike probably has either inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), small cell lymphoma, or both. At this point, the list of what he doesn't have is longer. Doesn't have renal failure, a thyroid condition, leukemia, or FIV (aka kitty AIDS). The biggest immediate problem is appetite. A cat who once topped 20 pounds is down to 11 pounds. Step 1 has been to get something he can eat and will eat. (No cat is ever too sick to give up being finicky.)

Step 2 was to weigh the options the vet presented: either exploratory surgery, which would be followed by chemo ($$$$$) if the Dx of lymphoma was confirmed. The extension of lifespan is unimpressive. Otherwise, a course of prednisone which would increase his appetite and have a very good chance of containing IBD if that's the cause. If it's lymphoma, prednisone is honestly just palliative care. We spent more time getting ourselves around the options than we did making the decision: no surgery; no chemo. Mr. Spike is not the sharpest tool in the shed, owing to a probable brain injury in kittenhood (fell downstairs). He would be even more miserable going through that than an animal of normal intelligence. So the game is just make his tummy feel well enough to be comfortable and make eating OK again, and let him see another spring.

In human years, he's just our age, which makes the experience especially sobering. Dang the critters anyway.

But now, to other news....

Bloggers the world over are exercised over Herman Cain having hired someone from Rick Perry's strategy team to help him bone up on foreign policy. They are micro-dissecting Mr Sandusky's aptly-named denial statement to Bob Costas. There are numerous other profound questions to discuss.

With the blogospheric minority, I'm watching the Adventure of the Downing Street cat. P.M. Cameron is coming nobly to Larry's defence in the face of the characteristic idiocy of the British media. I would say he's resisting the pressure to throw Larry under the bus, if that metaphor weren't nastily literal in the case of hoomans and kittehs.

The problem? Larry, brought on staff as a mouser, apparently had his paws full. The 300-or-so-year-old Prime Minister's house seems to have A street kitteh by trade, Government expected he could stay a mouse invasion on his own. Staff verified three kills. But the mouse that cause the stir was one he missed: which was spotted at a state dinner.

Oh the outrage (real or feigned)! Was Larry asleep on watch? Well of course he was: he's a cat. He needs his 16 hours of catnapping. There are rumours of a girlfriend. Well, if no one clipped his kitty bollocks, and if there's a lady cat within hail, of course he has a girlfriend.

As a cat person currently afflicted with a notoriously inept mouser, I'm proud of the P.M. for sticking up for Larry. Let's give the kitteh a break...and maybe some reinforcements.

Ambitions for the afterlife

Heh. One of them would be never to stall for ten days without writing anything. My rather odd work schedule (half-day, full day x 2) has led me into a rhythm for writing, and over the past few days that rhythm has been interrupted. No, make that torn down, spat upon and trampled. It does make one reflect that scheduled time to write, no matter how oddly achieved, is fairly important to the craft.

Among the distractions has been redoing the kitchen vinyl tile. Why uncool vinyl, you ask? Why not ceramic? Because

1. It's an old house with lightly-framed floors and the weight per square foot of the vinyl is less than half that of most ceramic.
   
2. Period kitchen floor covering for a vernacular house of this age (c. 1895) is linoleum. I go with tile because one can do the job in sections, which is impossible with linoleum, or I should say sheet vinyl.

I did manage to inflict a variety of damage on my crumbling body even doing as much as I did, and shall likely do that again at intervals until the job is done. This led me to a reflection on mortality.

All winter I've been watching the back yard symbiosis between the feeder birds and the crows. The former don't come out of the bushes to nibble and bathe until the latter give the all-clear. This is necessary because one neighbour's cat lives mostly outdoors, and shows an excessive interest in the birds. We also have picked up a sharp-shinned hawk. The hawk is of a genus (buteos) that by nature doesn't chase a lot of small live birds. But, absent the accipiter hawks that do, buteo (or buzzard) hawks are opportunists.

The feeder birds, especially the sparrows, are what the poet had in mind when coining the expression "bird-brain." Left to their own devices, they go merrily into harm's way, even if the cat is watching from below and the hawk from above. Not so with crows. I've watched them from boyhood on, and have developed a deep respect for their collective intelligence and survival skill.

Watch a murder (that's what it is) of crows to see this in action. There will not be a single bird in sight. Turn away, then turn back. A scout crow will appear if there is any food to be had. In our neighbourhood, the scout perches at the topmost end of the highest branch of a large oak at the end of the street, swaying nearly 100 feet up. When the scout is satisfied that serious predators (read cats and hawks) don't pose a problem, it will caw.

Then one or two crows fly into the target area, swoop over it, and perch in medium-height branches of nearby trees. They're the close support. Not only can they warn against predators, but they can attack them. Hawks, with their binocular vision, are vulnerable from behind. They can be chased off by birds much smaller than crows. Cats--at least this one--seem nonplussed at being buzzed by birds nearly as large as they are, and most retreat when crows show up.

Once the crows have established their perimeter, the rest of the family arrives, and everyone (or nearly everyone) gets a turn at the goodies, be they a bird feeder or a pizza carton in someone's trash. There is always a scout, and there are always close support guards, and they seem to take this by turns.

In the case of our feeder, when the crows arrive, the feeder birds pitch in, secure amongst the bigger, more alert cousins, who don't seem to mind the little birds. The crows do object to sharing with squirrels, who generally wait for their chance under cover. Then, at some crowish signal, the whole circus melts away, to repeat the same act elsewhere.

Should there be anything in reincarnation, one could make a good case for coming back as a crow. There's something to be learned about cooperation and learning. Like cockroaches, their ancestors were around long before ours--and probably ate some of our ancestors after their incessant conflicts. The descendants of both will probably outlive our self-destructive species by many millennia. The cockroach may be more durable, but the crows are smarter.

More feline news

I stick to this because the last 36 hours have mostly been about work, and I don't talk about jobs here.

The vet called to say Mr Spike's blood work is excellent. Swell: we spent a ridiculous amount of money to find out what we already knew. Spike is overweight, bad-tempered with strangers, but otherwise absurdly healthy.

In my turn I reported that the experimental portion of diet cat food is a success, so starting tomorrow my shopping has to include a periodic stop at the vet's to buy his Rx food. We're still working out how Annie is going to get enough to keep her going whilst we keep our boy's consumption down to something less than a St. Bernard's.

I really don't see why animal shelters don't take trades... (just kidding).

Today's rants

1) There is an absolutely splendid road in the White Mountains that runs East-West through drop-dead gorgeous scenery. It's called the Kancamagus Highway, named after a leader of the Penacook nation. Note that it is not spelled Kancamangus: so wtf do white people of all sorts and conditions pronounce it as if it were? Note also how I fly to the defence of anyone whose name is mispronounced by idiots.

2) Mr Spike and the entire household paid the wages of his sins today. Because he has so many black marks on his permanent vet record that one can hardly read his name, we must now assume ahead of time that he will be knocked out for his annual physical, and fast him. The vets put their most cat-friendly practitioner on the case. All the same, this cat whose brains are in his stomach had been NPO for 15 hours by the time he saw her. St Francis of Assisi couldn't have coaxed good behaviour out of our boy under those conditions. He behaved badly and got knocked out.

All this meant that Ms. Annie had to fast also. She was more philosophical about it and we got her some food as soon as Spike was in the car. But having fasted meant that she failed to deliver a stool sample. Such is life.

His health is OK but could be better. No heart murmur this year, although there was some sign of enlarged heart wall muscle: no surprise in a cat who now tips the scale at 20 lb though eating his own food, Annie's food, and anything hooman that he fancies and can get at. And getting food is his chief exercise.

No pills, thank the goddess of suffering cat people. However, he now has to go on prescription diet cat food. So now we have to balance the fact that he needs to drop 1-2 lb with the fact that Annie can't spare another ounce of body weight, and if it's available, he'll eat it.

Our boy is on notice that when Ms A checks out, the next quadruped in this house is going to be a dog.

3) Oh how could I forget Ms. O'Donnell? I rather wish I could. Here is a politician who makes Dan Quayle look articulate. The China faux pas will probably play well in the bible belt, so what a pity she isn't running there. Just now, I won't start on the difference between China's traditional priorities and the insecure projections of some Americans: just laying it out there that such projections exist. The creepy part is that this year in particular, people who ought to be committed could possibly get elected.

More proof that the cats are winning

I become semi-conscious in the pre-dawn hour at all seasons, which is a nuisance in the summer. Today, a repeated "ackkk---ackkk" sound penetrated my brain, where the grey cells immediately translated it to "cat--hairball--yuck!"

I hopped out of bed and sure enough, found Mr Spike on the wrong--inner--side of the bedroom door. I had no sooner opened the door than the hacking stopped. I got a "thanks, dude" look and he exited triumphant. Of course, no hairball.

This is disturbing, because we have never made a big deal about Mr Spike's imminent hairball throws. Ms Annie's, however, are bothersome, because at her age it's never certain whether the next hairball will be her last. Mr Spike has clearly seen this, noted the reaction, and realised that a good throaty hack is the best way to get attention from the hoomans. It is more speculative, of course, but possibly Ms Annie has been beta testing the response reflex, and Mr Spike is simply putting the whole thing into production.

This sort of thing has drawn attention even from dedicated goggie people. Manipulation of this level indicates that a higher intelligence is at work. Kittehs--emissaries from a parallel and more advanced universe.