Current State of the Cats Address

Cat 1 Kira: Picked her up in my sister-in-law’s backyard and took her home. She was full of worms and in failing health after several litters raised in the woods. She was only a kitten herself. She had been abandoned by a girl who had rented a place next to my sister-in-law for awhile. I had already acquired two of her kittens the year before.

Cats 2 and 3, Sulu and Seven: Kira’s sons, acquired when my sister-in-law was renovating her house and they were evicted from her basement. Sulu has always been friendlier and more outgoing than Seven. He came out of the cage first. Seven crawled out later and hid for a long time. Seven had an ear hematoma and it was literally buttoned up. After draining surgery, the vet sewed three buttons in his ear to keep the layers together. He also had what we thought might be a fatal urinary issue, but after one attack, seemed to recover.

Cats 4 through 7, Mackie, Lokai, BeeGee, and Jammer, “the blacks”: All neighborhood strays we fed for a year or more before they finally got beaten down enough by cold weather or heat, or just became familiar enough with us that I could pick them up and take them to the vet and get them fixed. They are all either solid black or black and whites.

BeeGee, aka Black Girl and Baby Girl, was already fixed, abandoned by neighbors down the street who moved and left her behind.

Jammer aka Fat Andy came already fixed, dumped in our neighborhood after being abandoned by the people who adopted him from a rescue group. He even had a chip. We had been feeding another black and white cat, Andy, for many months, when Jammer came around and started stealing his food. I guess Andy thought we were no longer a viable source and we never saw him again. The last time I saw him, I followed him a couple of blocks to see where he went when he wasn't in my yard, and I had to give up after he went over a fence.

Mackie was “the cat in the window” for a very long time, always on the back deck and looking through the window into my husband’s den, wishing he could be inside, but evading our efforts to bring him inside. The first couple of times I tried, he freaked out and we had to let him back out after a day or two. Finally, I just immediately put him in a cage and called vets until one would fix him that day. Even then I let him back out when he recovered, but after that, he didn’t freak out when he was inside, and eventually became reluctant to ever go out. He was in a group of other black and white cats who we never could catch – Sylvester, Whiteface, Andy and Hitler. All those eventually disappeared.

Cats 8-10, Cat Daddy, Jordy, and Odo : The trio from the field. I was leaving for work late and angels told me to take a long-cut, not even a short-cut, through a neighborhood five blocks away that I don’t ever drive through. I passed an open field where I saw three cats walking together. I slowed down, got out of my car, and started walking toward them. The largest and smallest cats ran off, but the middle one came up to me and rolled over. I immediately snatched him up and took him home and put him in the laundry room until I got home from work. His ear was clipped, so we thought a rescue group had already neutered and returned him (catch and release program), but it was a premature clipping because he still had one testicle. Turned out the second had never descended so he needed the female surgery to get fixed. That was Jordy. 

When my husband came home from work that day, he said he couldn't find the kitten I told him I had stashed in the laundry room. We looked all over. He finally spotted him on a shelf in the electrical closet, behind a toolbox. Pulling him out was like his birth into our home. Because he had one infected eye, I wanted to name him Geordi after Geordi La Forge, but it was too difficult a name to spell. So, Jordy.

A few days later, while I had him in the backyard in a cage, acclimating him to the sights and smells of my yard for orientation, the smallest cat from the trio in the field, Odo, suddenly appeared sitting next to his cage. They rubbed their faces through the netting as if they knew each other, which is why I felt for sure this was the other cat from the field. "There's his running buddy," my husband said.

I fed the little cat for a month before I was able to grab him by the scruff and get him in the house. Two years later, that is still the last time I’ve touched him. He dodges people, but loves my other cats. Even my husband, the Cat Whisperer, hasn’t been able to touch him. Hence the shape-shifter name of Odo. 

The third cat from the field showed up a few weeks after that, and I fed him in the front yard for months before I was able to grab him and carry him in. Cat Daddy -- because his coloring was so close to Jordy's, he looked like Jordy's daddy -- was weak and had a runny nose. I took him to a clinic, and they ran a blood test and said he was so anemic, that couldn’t promise he’d even make it through the night, and if I took him home without treatment, he’d die. He didn’t look that sick to me, but I left him at the vet, figuring that was the end of him. Two days later they called me to come get him and gave me a bill for $800. I talked them down to $600, since it wasn’t technically even my cat. Then I saw a photo contest on Twitter for How Would You Spend $500? I entered Daddy’s photo and won. So since Daddy mostly paid for himself, I kept him. He now weighs 22 pounds.

Cat 11: Tinker. I just decided the next cat, whoever it was, would be Tinker, and there were three possibilities, not counting Kanga, who I kept in the house twice for a week each time, but he kept trying to bust through the window, so I let him go. Tinker started showing up from time to time. My husband called him Fluffy because of his long, reddish-black-dark brown hair. When he got to the point where he’d take his meals on the front stoop and let my husband touch him, I said, grab him. The two others of a similar size might be his littermates, but they only come by late at night looking for food and run off as soon as I open the door. Tinker and Odo both had testicles, which meant a lot of stalking and staring, and sometimes a wrestling match and a high-pitched chase. Tinker has made no effort to escape the house. He has since had his testicles clipped, with hopes he will not challenge Odo to a duel every time they pass.

How Chatterbox Came to Us

On the evening of his death, Aug. 28, 2018, I looked up his chapter on how he came to us. In the end, at age 15 or 16, he was the victim of a mysterious wound on his neck that would not heal, and it set off a chain reaction of losing weight, and other head wounds, and a hematoma in his ear that required surgery, and he never really recovered from that. An hour after I took him back to the vet to have the stitches taken out of his ear, he died. I kind of blame myself for agreeing to a B12 shot.

A co-worker came to me in tears. She needed a home for her black Persian cat Imani, her $300 kitten which was now a grouchy 6-year-old. She and her sister had bought this kitten and treated it like their baby, complete with a wardrobe and colored claw covers. Then one sister moved in with a boyfriend who didn’t like cats, or was allergic, so Imani stayed with the other sister until she acquired a designer dog. Imani didn’t like the dog and became irritable. For that offense, she was farmed out to the girls’ father and his new wife, where Imani stayed alone and neglected in an unfinished part of the house. Then dad wanted the cat out.

So that’s where I came in. I reluctantly agreed to take the cat. My first Persian! But it wasn’t a very good experience. Imani stayed in a closet for a week, then came out but was always in a bad mood about something. She chased any cat that came near her, scooting across the floor, looking like a black dust mop. The fact that I couldn’t see her eyes or much of her face made it hard to bond with her. She looked like a pile of fur to me. She wasn’t that crazy about me either.

Then she threw up a hairball on the beige carpet in my home office, and that stain never came out even though it was a supposedly stain proof Berber carpet. I began imaging the stain as an evil cancer and Imani was the demon carrier. The more I scrubbed it, the larger the stain grew.

So I called a cat rescue group that adopted cats from cages at the PetSmart. They had a cage available and thought Imani would be adopted quickly even though the flyer I made warned that she had to go to a no pet, no children home. I didn’t feel too sad taking Imani to the store.

I went to visit her a couple of times a week and she, of course, didn’t recognize me and didn’t seem too disturbed about living in a glass box at a pet store. She just sat there. She couldn’t see the other animals in the cages around her, so maybe she thought she was alone and queen of the room again. Every time I visited, other visitors would be admiring her beautiful long black fur and regal manner. Soon she was gone. I hope she found happiness.

Meanwhile, in another cage was an ugly little gray cat who looked like Neelix’s identical twin. Week after week he was there, small, alone, and unchosen. I finally asked about him and learned the cat rescue people had decided he had to be adopted along with two others because they were attached. The two others, Harry and Blackie, shared a cage, but this one, Chatterbox, was kept separate because he had to eat a special high fiber diet for his irritable bowel syndrome. I have IBS, so I immediately empathized with him, even though I had never heard of a cat with this problem.

Once a day he was allowed in the cage with Harry and Blackie while his cage was being cleaned, and he would hug and lick them; hence, the decision was made that they were all inseparable. I weighed in that I thought the requirement to adopt all three, at $90 a shot, was what was keeping all of them from finding homes. Chatterbox had been a shelter kitten no one wanted, rescued by the cat club on execution day. And then, probably because of his plain looks, chronic diarrhea and Harry and Blackie situation, had spent almost a year in the cage at PetSmart with no takers. He idly passed the time playing with a few toys and was always vocally excited whenever anyone came in to clean up, so they named him Chatterbox.

That crazy gear in my head turned and I was determined to adopt Chatterbox, diarrhea and all, and even pay $90 for him. It took a month of emails and notes pinned to his cage at the PetSmart to convince them to separate him from Harry and Blackie, and it wasn’t until they had someone interested in those two who didn’t want Chatterbox before they finally agreed to let him go separately. Then Blackie’s feline leukemia test came back positive, so all three of them were quarantined for another 30 days until Blackie could be retested, and it turned out to be a false positive.

Meanwhile, I was visiting Chatterbox a couple of times a week, getting into the backroom to hold him and becoming more and more desperate to take him home.

Finally the day arrived and Chatterbox came home and never said a word about missing Harry or Blackie. He immediately took to Neelix and was ready to recreate their lost kittenhood together, even though they were one and two years old. Whenever Neelix went down for a nap, Chatterbox would lick him all over.

It was impossible to keep Chatterbox on his special high fiber diet. He much preferred the other cats’ food, so his bowels went from loose to liquid. We put out more litter boxes, and he tried to make it to them, but didn’t always succeed. You’d pick him up, and feces would drip down your shirt. I tried dosing him with liquid Imodium, which works for me, but didn’t make a dramatic difference with him.

It was only after we packed up the house to move to the next one that I learned the true extent of his problem when I found dozens of dried up puddles of brown inside shoes and behind furniture.

Bobby insisted we keep his PetSmart name, thinking Chatterbox was used to it, instead of giving him a new Star Trek name. I considered Chatterbox his “slave” name. Eventually, I managed to get it shortened to Chatter.

Chatter was just as affectionate to us as he was to Neelix. The girl cats, as usual, wanted nothing to do with him. He slept in our bed with us, which had a bad result one evening when he lost control of his bowels while napping on Bobby’s chest, tail to face. A stagnant pool of brown shot over Bobby’s neck and shoulder and I woke up to yelling. We ran to the bathroom where I had to pull the neck of Bobby’s soiled T-shirt out as far as I could so his head could pass through without rubbing anymore feces into his face. Then he jumped in the shower.

The next day was a Sunday, so my only choice was the emergency vet where they treated the situation like a routine bout of diarrhea, gave Chatter a pill and injected some liquid under his skin to rehydrate him, although that was hardly a problem. After a couple of days without any improvement, I went to my regular vet and told him the whole irritable bowel syndrome story. The vet said that was crazy.

I said Chatter was checked out by the vet servicing the cats at PetSmart. He said that vet was doing the minimum she could get away with since she was donating her time.

He took a stool sample and looked at it under the microscope, came back and said it was the worst case of giardia—intestinal parasites—he had ever seen. A $12 vial of liquid Metronidazole fixed Chatterbox right up, although Neelix managed to catch it, too, and had to have his turn with medication.

Bobby and I cheered as Chatter’s bowels became progressively more solid, and then indistinguishable from the others. He continues to enjoy eating whatever he wants. He has a whole house to live in now, instead of the confines of a cage, and eventually earned the right to go outside because he comes back when you call him and seldom jumps the fence or leaves the yard. With so much agreeable pleasure in his life, he had less to chatter about, so his name doesn’t fit anymore. For a cat who knew nothing but isolation, first in a shelter and then a pet store cage, he is a perfect, pleasant cat. It seems to defy all the rules about establishing a cat’s personality by how it’s handled as a kitten.

***

Chatter is so sweet, and so accepting of all the other cats, and so willing to share his affection with them, the fact that the worst thing to happen to any of them should happen to him hardly seemed fair.

It was a perfect storm of bad luck, bad decisions, and bad parenting on our part.

One Saturday morning in early October, I let all the cats out that were allowed out without supervision, and as the morning wore on, they all came back to the door as usual. What was not usual was Chatter was the first one who wanted back in.

Later on in the morning, Bobby came shouting up the stairs that Chatter was injured and needed to go to the vet right then. I hate those words because I’m always on the fence about going to the vet. I fear the big bill for something that might have resolved itself in time. I always want to wait. And these things always happen on the weekends when our only option is the more expensive emergency vet.

Chatter didn’t seem injured, but he growled if you touched him and his tail was hanging limp. There was no obvious injury. Did something bite him? I called around the closest vets to see if anyone was open and found one was indeed open for 45 more minutes. Off we went.

When I took Chatter out of his cage in the examining room, there was a little bit of blood in the cage, so he did have a cut.

But now I’ll always wonder if it was something that would have healed by itself if I had stayed home. The young female veterinary assistant shaved Chatter’s tail and nicked it, taking off a nickel-sized layer of skin as well as the hair. Now he was bleeding profusely. When the vet walked in, she immediately assessed that whatever the problem was, they had just made it worse.

But, not to worry! Here’s a band-aid and some antibiotics. Come back Monday during regular hours and we’ll fix him up. That’ll be $75.

Chatter seemed fine, and when we went back, his tail was fine, too. X-rays showed it wasn’t broken. He should wear a big collar so he doesn’t pick at his tail. Here’s some more antibiotics and some cleaner to squirt on the wound every day. The worst case scenario is if he doesn’t regain some movement in his tail, he might not recognize it as his tail anymore and keep attacking it and it would have to come off. Other than that, everything is fine. That’ll be $250.

Chatter kept pulling off the collar, so we came up with the idea of bandaging the tail, a bad idea. Small bandages were pulled off. So we bandaged the entire tail. That worked so well, we forgot about it for a week. Then when we took off the bandage, either the scab came off with it and we were back to square one, or it never healed in the first place. He was bleeding profusely again.

We went back to small bandages. The tail scabbed up again and was stiff as a twig. Or maybe, in retrospective, the whole tail died. We don’t know. One night towards midnight, a month after the initial injury, I was trying to put a fresh bandage on the wound that just wasn’t healing, and Chatter ran away. I heard Bobby yelling those dreadful words up the stairs again, “We have to go to the vet! Chatter’s tail is hanging by a thread!” Literally.

That sounded bad. Bobby tends to exaggerate in a panic, but even if that was an exaggeration, hanging by anything is not good, so I grabbed my purse and the cage. He put Chatter in the box and off we raced downtown to the emergency vet. Chatter was quiet, not even giving a mournful yowl periodically about riding in the car. That wasn’t good either.

At the emergency vet, we had to wait. Young couples with happy dogs were leaving. One of the dogs was wearing a medical cone around his head, but he still seemed happy. A young man was there with a yowling cat wrapped in a blanket. They took him first even though we had arrived before him with a cat whose tail was falling off. Then they came for us, and under the lights of the examining room, Bobby pointed out Chatter’s dilemma. It looked like the two parts of his tail were attached by only a thin white string. What happened to the scabby wound in the middle of the tail? It was gone. The vet came in, a boy so young, his complexion was still splotchy, but he seemed on the ball, ready to do whatever was necessary for the animals who come in the middle of the night. He took Chatter away, cage and all.

We sat in the waiting room for awhile. I thought the yowling I was hearing was Chatter, so I went down to another examining room and peeped through the window. The man who came alone with the yowling cat in the blanket was hunched over it. The cat was still yowling.

“Don’t go in there,” the receptionist hissed at me. “He’s saying good bye.” I jumped back. How horrible was that, to be spending your last few moments with your yowling cat before it is put down? This was a place of misery and Chatter was trapped in it. For six years, I had lived in an apartment overlooking the back of this vet’s office, and sometimes I would see them carrying large garbage bags out of the building and load them onto a truck. I suspected the bags were full of dead animals.

The man with the yowling cat came out and spoke to the receptionist. I strained to hear what they were saying, and it sounded like he was going to come back tomorrow. Was the cat going to be fixed and saying good-bye was just for the night? Or was he coming back for the body tomorrow? I was trying to feel bad for him going through this alone, but he didn’t look particularly sad. Maybe he was putting on a brave face.

Whatever…it kept my mind off Chatter, and the huge bill. I was imagining $1,000. So I was almost relieved when the vet came out and gave me the estimate of $650, as if all Chatter needed was some bodywork, like he was a dented car. Fine, fine. We signed the papers and were told we could come back in a few hours to get him. It was 1 a.m. I decided to get up at 5 a.m. as usual and rush back.

Bobby got up, too, and we reclaimed our now bob-tailed Chatter. Bobby called in sick so he could stay home, but I was in the middle of a crisis at work…one person had quit, another had been fired, and the survivors were all walking on eggshells. I was doing my work and the work of the missing, and was afraid to call in sick.

Chatter seemed fine. We had a new pill to give him every day and he didn’t want to wear the collar. After a few days, he perked up enough to pull the collar off and chew off half the stitches in his stump. I heard Bobby yelling again that Chatter had to go to the vet.

I hoped he was exaggerating, but part of Chatter’s stump looked like a jelly donut. So back in the cage he went. We got to Lakeview, the vet that nicked his tail in the first place, right before they closed for the evening. The vet on call was a different one, so we rushed through the whole gruesome story again of how Chatter’s tail came to be missing. She took Chatter away and brought him back with new stitches, a bag of syringes filled with painkiller, and a hard plastic head cone to replace the soft one. That’ll be $100.

He didn’t like the cone, but the painkillers kept him docile enough to deal with it, but when they ran out, he figured out ways to pop the cone off his head and pull at the stitches, and we still had a week to go before they were due to come out.

In the end, we managed. The stump survived and after a long while, the fur grew back. He wiggles his stump with the same expressiveness he did his tail. And when he gets angry or startled, the fur on the stump puffs all out and looks like a rabbit’s tail. But I never went back to that vet.