A Life in Cats: Confessions of a Crazy Cat Lady

Demon Cat

2010-12-08T20:26:00.000-05:00

Neelix

Seven

2010-03-10T18:51:00.002-05:00

Time Heals

2010-03-02T19:03:00.003-05:00

Time passes. It's been nearly eight months since Merly died and two months since Callie died, and I no longer flinch when I look at the side of our bed, where Merly chose to camp in her final days, or at the pink papasan chair in my office, which was once Callie's exclusive roost. Neelix is sleeping in the chair right now, all rolled up inside the tunnel bed. Merly is a long ago and fading memory. Her bones rest in the cold woods in a neighboring county. When we drive past those woods on the way to my mother-in-law's, I think of her then and call out that I am near. Poor Callie, I will probably have no occasion to ever visit her resting place at an aunt's home in yet another county. I bought a painting of a calico cat on eBay which has facial colorings very similar to Callie's, so I hope her soul rests there instead of in those distant woods.

Immortality Through Cat Hoarding

2010-02-16T12:15:00.000-05:00

Last night, as I was in the bed with one of the cats on my chest, I said my usual prayer for a long life so I could survive to take care of all the people and things that needed me: my husband, my son, my seven cats.

Then I had an epiphany about why animal hoarders keep so many pets. It's a form of immortality for us. As long as something needs you, then nothing can happen to us. The more cats, the more we are needed, even if we have long ago passed the ability to take care of those animals in any meaningful way. You still have the sense of a large population depending on you.

It makes sense, since so many hoarders are single, older women who may not be able to define their purpose in life in any other way.

The Unknown Cat

2009-12-23T14:01:00.006-05:00

Callie didn't come to me like a refugee, with nothing to her name. She was a grand dame in a large carrying case, much nicer than any I already had. She had a comfy pad inside with her, already soiled with cat hair as if she had been sitting peacefully in this cage for quite awhile.

The pad and the cage were the only items that seemed even slightly used. Her two food bowls were brand new. The hair brush was still in its package. There were six cans of deluxe Science Diet hairball control food. There was a new litter box and shovel, and a container of cat litter. Whoever was passing this cat along at least cared enough to give her a good start in her new home. Mostly everything was new for her new life. I would have preferred to see some well-worn possessions to give me a clue about who she was.

I would have benefited from more information. Callie's journey to me was through two others, so I never spoke to the original owner. A neighbor I seldom talked to collected Callie from her sister, who had collected her from a friend because the friend planned to put her down. They were moving. Something had happened in their life. Loss of job, or house, or a new husband, or a new baby. The story was vague. The cat was maybe named Callie. Like the game Telephone, when information goes through a line of people, it gets distorted.

Callie, I was told, was at least 9 years old. (The vet would later guess 13 to 15.) She was most certainly deaf and declawed. I had no information on when those catastrophic events happened. I had no information on what she liked to eat, or what a typical day was like for her. No information on any favorite activities. No information.

Callie was a good traveler. She did not seem upset when I took her cage the first time and brought her inside. Our one evening trip to the vet went fine. She made no noise in the car and showed the most curiosity that I had ever seen in her, looking out the window at the passing lights. She was well behaved at the vet. She took her medicine without a fight.

But the three weeks of twice daily antibiotics didn't radically change her behavior. She still ate very little if anything at all, and seldom moved except to go to the litter box. To the end she was a polite lady, never incontinent, leaky, or smelly. You wouldn't know anything was wrong except for her muscles atrophying so she was wobbly on her back legs.

The vet claimed the blood test showed no organ failure, just an infection of some type that would take more money to investigate. And she had a heart murmur. And cataracts.

She had shown some interest in her new home the first couple of weeks, hissing at the other cats, checking out the bathroom, coming into the bedroom at night and jumping on the bed, enthusiastically eating her food with an audible "nom nom nom." But when her appetite faded, she lost all interest in everything except snoozing on a heating pad in a papasan chair in the corner.

The chair was behind me in my home office. Whenever I walked in to work, she greeted me with a single, "moaw." If I turned around in my chair after working at the computer, she said it again. She tolerated petting, but didn't want to be picked up. Whenever I tried putting her in another room, she immediately made her way back to the papasan chair. Then it got to the point wjere picking her up, even if I put her right back, was so exhausting, she panted for many minutes, or jumped off the chair and pushed herself up against the wall under the chair so I couldn't pick her up again.

On the last day, that's what killed her. I put her on a scratching post perch in another room so she could see out the window, and she jumped down. I picked her up again and put her on my bed, and she jumped down again. The two jumps were too exhausting. She couldn't slow her breathing no matter how wide she opened her mouth, and when I picked her up a third time to comfort her, her head snapped back and she went limp.

Finally, she was relaxed and comfortable in my arms, a sleeping beauty, face serene. No incontinence, or blood. Or smell. She was a polite and tidy lady to the end.

I can't believe she's gone. It was only seven weeks, yet every time I pass the room, I expect to see her in the chair. I expect to hear the "moaw." When I turn around from my computer, she should be there. No other cat in the house has resumed using the chair, even though some of them did before she came.

I should get rid of the chair because it's such an empty throne now, but I think that might make me feel worse. I'd like Callie's ghost to visit me and tell me about her life. I still want to know.

Callie Died - My Fault Again

2009-12-19T15:01:00.003-05:00

Callie's not in the chair behind me this afternoon as I work, the first time in seven weeks. She died just an hour ago. As usual, I cannot leave well enough alone.

Okay, she barely moved, barely ate, but at least she was alive. If I picked her up, it upset her and she'd breathe heavy, so better to not pick her up, right?

No, I had to today. I wanted to show her the snow out the window. I wanted to change her blankets and give her fresh ones. I put her down on the cat climber near the window and she didn't like it. She wanted back in her corner, but when I brought her there, she was panting so hard, she went under the chair. Then she was panting very hard and biting the chair leg. It reminded me of when Merly was biting on the blanket when she had her final seizures. I watched her for a few minutes, praying it would subside. She acted like she needed to throw up a hairball, so I picked her up again and patted her like I was trying to burp a baby. She threw her head back in a jerk, and was suddenly totally still. Oh no!

I killed her by picking her up. If I had just let her stay in her chair, maybe she'd still be alive. I saw her sitting in the middle of the room earlier today. She had gotten out of the chair for something. I can't believe she went that fast. I must have caused her to have a heart attack or stroke because I moved her.

We had a record snowfall last night. It hasn't snowed this much here since 1917 or something. Our street has not been cleared. We can't get to my mother-in-law's anytime soon. There is no where else to bury her. Animal Control said to put her in the garage to freeze until the weather broke, or just put her out in the trash.

Poor, lovely, gentle, calico cat. I don't know anything about you. I don't know how old you were. The vet thought maybe 13. I don't know if you were deaf all your life. I don't know if you were ever happy. Someone declawed you along the way. I don't think you were too happy here, despite the heating pad I gave you and the real tuna and real turkey you wouldn't eat. Sometimes you ate moist treats if I put them in front of you, one at a time.

The first week you were here, you walked around a little. You hissed at the other cats. You would meet my husband when he woke up and sit in the bathroom with him. Whenever I came into your room, you spoke to me. But you never got out of the chair. I know you missed the place you were used to, but I don't know what happened there. They lost their job. They gave up their house and moved into an apartment. They were going to put you down but gave you away instead. A couple of times you came into our bedroom at night.

Then you got sick and wouldn't eat. The vet said you had an infection and we gave you antibiotics twice a day for two weeks. You ate a little, but I guess not enough. Then I picked you up and upset you so much, you stroked out and died, or something.

I'm so sorry. I wanted to love you and give you a nice life.

Cat Hospice

2009-11-22T00:05:00.002-05:00

We've had Callie 21 days now and she went from sitting in a chair in the back bedroom, hissing at all the other cats, to walking down the hall hissing, to a week of sitting on the sofa in the living room, to being back in the chair in the back bedroom, practically comatose.

She hasn't eaten anything that I've noticed in several days, isn't drinking water, and the the few times she goes to the bathroom, it's very runny. She sleeps all day and night and barely moves. She's getting unsteady on her feet when she does try to move. I think I have another dying cat here.

And I'm angry. I'm angry that its owner, whoever it was, didn't see fit to let this cat live out its final days in the comfort of familiar surroundings. I'm angry that this poor cat went through its life deaf and declawed. I am sad that I never knew her when she was young and full of exuberance, that my only memory of her will be a very sad, listless cat. I'm sad that I can't think of anything she'd like to do. She doesn't want to be held. She doesn't want to look out a window. How is time passing for her? All she does is stare at the pink corduroy fabric of the bucket chair she's in. I can't take a dying cat to Disneyland. They don't care.

Maybe the owner was doing Callie a favor by deciding to put her down, and we rescuers just made Callie's situation worse.

I created one of those Apple iPhoto books with photos of Merly's life and even though I had seen it several times on the computer before sending it off to be printed, when the printed copy arrived, it was too much to bear. It was too soon to watch her whole life go by in just 20 pages of photos, from curious, thin young cat to scraggly looking cat who always looked confused and startled at the end. My husband put it down quickly, and I know I won't be able to page through it for...I don't know how long.

Callie has gone back to sleep without eating or drinking today. Holding her head up was too much work.

Callie

2009-11-08T14:11:00.003-05:00

Callie came to us on Sunday, Nov. 1. I'd been hearing about her from my husband for the past few days. A neighbor we seldom saw suddenly started talking to him because she knew we had cats. Her sister had a friend who was pregnant and decided to have her two cats put down to make way for the new baby, which seems a rather severe reaction to pregnancy.

A home had been found for one of them. The other was more of a problem. She was deaf and declawed. Don't you love people who threaten to have their pets killed if someone else doesn't provide for them? What a handy, blackmailing solution.

My husband was obviously moved by the dilemma because he presented the situation not as a story but as a situation we were now in as active participants in this cat's fate. I was immediately resigned to acquiring another accidental cat -- not one that I chose. I thought the plan was to gradually have fewer cats now that my own life can be measured in one cat lifespan left.

The arrangement was if the neighbor couldn't find someone else, we would take Callie, but that arrangement always means you're getting the cat. Callie arrived on a Sunday afternoon in a large, rather nice traveling case, with brand new food bowls, a hairbrush, and six cans of expensive Science Diet food. How old is Callie?

"Well, I know this woman had her for at least nine years, but I think she may be older," the neighbor said.

Was she very upset to be parting with a pet she had that long?

It turned out no. The woman showed no emotion. The husband had recently lost his job. A lot of reasons to be emotional here, and yet none were displayed. I guess anyone who would declaw a cat because furniture is more important than a cat's safety and emotional well-being might not have deep feelings of compassion.

So Callie has issues. She can't hear. She doesn't hear anything coming up on her or any of the comforting noises of a house --voices, arrivals home, cat food cans opening. She can't hear the birds outside. She can't claw. There is no pleasure in scratching. She can't even scratch where she itches. She's listless and fearful and growls at the other cats. She sleeps 23 hours a day in a corner of my office, burrowed down in a felt sack. When she talks, she talks loud, unable to modulate her voice. She is plaintive and I don't know how to comfort her. Everything she knows has changed to something she doesn't know and she doesn't know why it happened.

She is not an attractive cat. My husband guessed -- probably correctly -- that she was named Callie because she's calico. She is every cat color, black and orange and white. She doesn't know her name is Callie and won't know if we change it, although we won't. I tried to find a home for her the first few days I had her, posting on Twitter and Facebook, but after a week, to move her again would be cruel.

I wouldn't be surprised if she is older than 9 or even 10. I wouldn't be surprised if she is very old. There is no spring in her step. She yelps and grouses like an elderly woman who's uncomfortable in her own body. Her countenance is grouchy.

I don't sleep well and wake up often during the night, so I know Callie moves during the night, that she comes to our bedroom and gets on the bed, and then leaves again before dawn and returns to the sack in the corner of the office. Last night she sat on my husband's pillow all night.

The Black Kitten Day

2009-09-27T19:01:00.005-04:00

It all started with a small black cat on the side of an exit ramp on a Sunday morning.

We were pulling onto the interstate to deliver my son's laundry to him. We had some other objectives as well on that part of town. I was on the cell phone to him telling him we were on our way when I saw the cat and shouted, "Kitten!"

By the time my husband reacted and pulled over, we had cleared the ramp and were on the interstate. I jumped out of the car and ran up the ramp. The kitten was still sitting there right next to the road. My son was still on the phone shouting furiously at me, with plenty of f-words, which he uses frequently, that I didn't need another cat. "Where are you?" he shouted.

"I'm on the highway. I have to be careful. I'll see you in a little while," I shouted and hung up. I wasn't approaching the cat very quietly since I was in a half run, not even thinking that my sudden appearance might make it run into the path of a car. All I knew was: Save the Cat.

The cat ran down into the drainage ditch instead and shot past me. My husband was behind me and went down into the drainage ditch after the cat, which shot into a sewer pipe. By then we were calming down a little, realizing the impossibility of catching what was probably a very feral cat, and that being on the side of a highway entrance ramp was not the best place for us to be. We both headed back to the car. My cell phone was ringing.

My son was furious, still shouting expletives at me that I didn't need another cat. I have seven right now, down from eight. We lost one to cancer this summer. I've always had cats, but usually two. This is the most I've ever had, and how I came to have this many is a book in itself, which happens to be written and available on Kindle since I spent a year writing it and several months fruitlessly trying to find an agent to represent it and failed. There were no teenage vampires in my book.

My son has an issue with his temper escalating, which is another long story which I can never tell because I don't understand it myself. Instead of being glad that we were safely back in the car, on our way to his apartment, and had not acquired another cat, he instead launched into shouting about what an embarrassment I am to him, that my house smells like cat pee, that he can't come in the house, that he can't ever use my pool. He mentions one of my husband's friends and said that friend had asked him why he didn't stage an intervention on us.

My husband is a social person, and it does bother him that he can't entertain as much as he would like because of the cats. I am not a social person, so it doesn't bother me as much. And I really don't have much use for most of his friends, who drink a lot of beer and leave the bottles. Other things go on that smells worse than cat pee to me. This particular friend who suggested the intervention always has a beer in his hand, and I wouldn't say his life is so perfect that he doesn't need an intervention himself. Many a time my husband has left me to go over there and fix stuff for him. Cat pee may be anti-social, but it's no more repugnant than alcoholism and maintaining habits so expensive, you can't make a car payment.

But that's not the point. The fury was escalating and I was told not to bother to deliver the laundry.

And then do what with it? I was halfway there, but he had hung up. I was only going to put it in his car trunk anyway. We weren't coming to visit.

He lives in a rough neighborhood, with gangs, drug dealers, and other problems that come with low rent and subsidized housing, and yet we managed to embarrass all those people. Our cars passed on the bridge entering his neighborhood. He shouted at us and we both came to a stop, blocking traffic. I jumped out of the car with the laundry. I've seen him in this escalated anger many times before and knew it was best to say nothing and get out of there, but he was still shouting f-words.

Yep, at his mother. Everything he didn't like about me had become embodied with my stopping to pick up a cat off the highway.

This is not cool, and in a few moments, it occurred to my husband that this wasn't a very good mother-son conversation, and he started shouting f-words out the window, too. I could see a black church dismissing its congregants on the next block, all turning to look at us: white people behaving badly. Even the drug dealers on the corners were shocked. What is going on? Why is that woman leaving a sack of clothes on the bridge and running back to her car? Why are the men shouting curses at each other? I never felt like such white trash before.

Both cars zoom off. My husband now declares that we are coming back that night to take the car. The car my son drives is technically registered to us and insured by us. That's another long story. I tell him, no, that will only escalate this ridiculous scenario to another level. Things will start deflating soon if we don't do anything to aggravate it more. The cell phone rings again. I hear a voice telling me that my husband better watch it, shouting curse words at him like that. (Ironic?) I say, "But you're driving his car!" I don't know why I said that, or why I brake for kittens. Impulse control seems to be in short supply all around. The phone goes dead.

We forget the other errands we were going to do and go back home. I know my husband has been wounded by the cruel report of what his friend thinks about him behind his back. I should have never shared that, but I guess I wanted to spread the hurt around.

I am crying as quietly as I can because I know it's bad that I have too many cats, but it really is just one of them that is causing the problem and we love him too much to get rid of him. I know I'm an embarrassment for a mother, but I have been since he was 12 or so and he made me drop him off at school a block away so no one would see me. When was I not an embarrassment? I made a poor choice for his father; a worst choice for the stepfather who raised him, and then I got married yet a third time. I didn't have any money saved to pay for his college. I was not a success in my own career. I don't have enough money now to help him start his business. I've gained weight. My hair looks worn out, according to him. My clothes are frumpy. When have I ever been not an embarrassment?

My husband goes inside the house to watch football, and I go to K-Mart to buy toilet paper and candy. No one in K-Mart notices that my face is tear-streaked or that my cell phone keeps beeping with messages. The situation is de-escalating now, as it always does. I read his texts that his only concern is for my welfare. What if a state trooper had to come to his apartment to tell him his mother had been killed trying to rescue a cat by the side of the road, it would have ruined his day.

When I don't reply, I get a message that I must love cats more than I love him.

Well, I get more comfort from cats. They don't curse at me. So I text back that cats are my drug. Cats are my alcohol. It has nothing to do with him, as addicts always explain to their loved ones. Let it pass. Nothing bad happened. Let it go.

But the text messages keep coming. What about my mother-in-law? How would she feel if we were killed trying to rescue a cat? Well, she would have done the same thing, which is why my husband is the way he is, why we have so many cats, and why ultimately he's the one who stopped the car when I said, "Kitten!" instead of driving past and telling me it was too dangerous to try to get it.

Still, I think everyone's first impulse was the real one. Another cat would have escalated his embarrassment of me. My husband resents the money I spend on my son. His first impulse was to take the car back. My son probably resents the money I spend on the cats. I can't imagine he would come over or introduce me to his girlfriend even if I didn't have cats because another one of my shortcomings would be in the way.

Something in me feels the need to rescue animals even when it so negatively impacts my life, my relationships, and my finances.

The afternoon is ruined. I can't do anything productive. My chest hurts. I can't stop crying. I can't figure out how to fix things. I don't know what the boundaries are in family relationships. Once again, my son is alienated from yet another man I married. And one of my husband's friendships has been tainted. And I still feel very bad about the fate of that poor little cat -- not even thinking about how ferociously feral it might be, or diseased or rabid or anything. I just saw a little thing sitting forlornly on the side of a highway and said, "Kitten!"

And look what happened. What are the odds we would decide to go into town on a Sunday morning with his laundry, and be on the road right at the same time that cat decided to come out, and my son would call me right at that same moment? I guess every bad incident has a series of coincidental events colliding like that.

I can go years and years without seeing a stray kitten, yet this is the third one I've seen since Merly died. The first was a black and white one in our neighborhood, scooting along the drainage ditch. Then we saw it again on the side of the road one evening, then I saw it again crossing the street early one morning. When I stop and go back to get it, it's always gone.

The second one was at the post office. It ran through a hole in the fence when I stopped to get it.

The black cat was the third one.

Doing Too Much for the Dying

2009-09-14T17:12:00.004-04:00

Merly knew she was dying before we did, and she didn’t care. She made her peace with it before we did. Because we couldn’t accept her decision, we kept her alive another month and I don’t think it was a good month for her. I feel bad about that.

Merly’s life was eat, sleep, sit in the sunroom and look out the window. When there was an opportunity to go outside, she went out to eat grass and roll on the warm cement. Then she was ready to come back in. Sometimes she wanted her head scratched and would head butt you until you rubbed her. She liked being brushed. She did not like being picked up. She never had a bath. She did not like riding in the car so only went to the vet when it was absolutely necessary. She lived in four different houses and she adapted well to each one.

She did not socialize with the other cats in her last few years, or very much when she was younger. She kept to herself. Because of her size, all she had to do was hiss and the others would scatter. No one pestered her.

She was no trouble. She ate whatever food was available. I can’t think of any food that was her favorite. It was all good. She didn’t like missing a meal so often sat on the dining room table so she would be first. I suspected she ate all the leftovers, too, even if they were a day old.

She liked splashing her paws in the water bowl. She liked jumping up on the breakfast bar and sitting on the bills whenever I had them all spread out. She would rub her face against my pen when I was trying to write checks.

All that was her total life, and when she no longer felt like doing any of it, she had no reason to live anymore. In cat years, that happened when she was 13, which is 73 in people years. I guess that is a good life, but she seemed so healthy right up until the last 60 days, we didn’t think about her being old.

Merly was seriously overweight starting soon after we had her fixed when she was about a year old. At her heaviest, she might have been 17 pounds. Her stools were the largest and smelliest of all the cats, and she didn’t bother to bury them. Around 2005, four years before she died, I noticed there was sometimes blood in her stools. We took her to the vet about it, but their cursory examination didn’t find anything. I researched bloody stools in cats on the Internet and couldn’t find anything alarming about it. To discover if this was an early sign of what would eventually kill her would have cost hundreds of dollars in uncomfortable tests, and then what? If she had been a human, we would have done it, but she was a cat. She didn’t seem bothered by any digestive problems. We didn’t worry whenever the blood appeared on her stool like a garnish.

Four years passed. One day she was sitting on the bills on the breakfast bar and when I moved her off, I noticed small droplets of liquid stool on the envelopes. Why was she dripping? That was the first sign something bad was happening, but it didn’t happen again, so I didn’t do anything. I feel bad about that, but it may already have been too late.

In the middle of May when we took her to the rabies clinic at the fairgrounds – where she mournfully expressed her distress at being in the car – she seemed to be her normal weight. At least that’s what we remember. When you’re not looking for signs, you don’t really notice when they begin.

But soon after that we couldn’t help but notice she was getting thinner. We thought it was a good thing. Maybe she wasn’t eating as much and was finally slimming down to normal cat size.

By June, we could feel the bumps of her spine along her back. She was losing muscle weight, too. She wasn’t jumping up on the breakfast bar anymore, or the dining room table. It was time to take her to the vet. She didn’t like the car ride.

The vet felt a mass in her abdomen. I blame the vet for being too tactful with us. He was certain she was going to die sooner than later and this mass was not a good thing, but he kept offering things we could do. We could leave her for the day so they could put her on an IV and rehydrate her. We could bring her in the next day for another day on the IV. We agreed to both. Merly didn’t appreciate the two days in a cage at the vet’s. Her choice, if she could talk, would have been to skip the rehydrating and stay at home. She didn’t care about living an extra month. To do what? 

I can understand that people want to do something for their dying cat, so vets make offers of various things, costly things, futile things, that humans can do to make themselves feel better. The cat, on the other hand, doesn’t want to do any of it. They just want to die quietly, soon, and on their own terms. They are not going to miss you. They aren’t going to miss being alive. They aren’t afraid of death. All they know is they don’t want to hurt or feel even a little uncomfortable and strange, and if they don’t feel like eating anymore, if they can’t eliminate without messing themselves, if they’re too weak to jump up on the table and look out the window at the birds, then why live? They don’t care about living. Or dying.

Merly wasn’t looking out the window anymore. She wasn’t interested in eating unless I brought it to her, and then she only took a few bites. She couldn’t climb into the litter box anymore, and so sometimes she had accidents, even after we got her a box with a door open to ground level. We’d have to clean her up with a damp washcloth and she didn’t like the bath. She looked at us like we were just annoying her with all this attention.

She had already picked her place to die, on the floor by the side of the bed. She liked the bowl of water we kept there and drank often from it, although she had to tip her head to the side and got half her face wet. And she was too tired to dry herself, so she just sat there with a wet face. That upset me more than anything. I should have known that was the end. We were done. She was done. When she felt especially bad, she’d creep halfway under the bed, too tired to make it all the way.

But I kept pulling her out, kept trying to get her to eat. Trying to dry her face for her. I even tried force-feeding her with a syringe. If she had the strength, she would have slapped me away. If she could talk, I know she would have said, “Leave me alone!”

I agreed to x-rays, and the mass was clearly visible and growing rapidly. We declined the offer of exploratory surgery because the only point of it seemed to be to tell us what was going to kill her. No vet would offer even the possibility that they could cut the mass out and she’d be good as new. We feared we’d get a call while she was still on the operating table that it was indeed cancer and there was too much of it and the best thing to do would be not wake her up. We didn’t want her to die that way, although in the end, even that would have been better than the way we finally let her die.

The best choice, of course, would have been to do nothing. She knew it was time. She was good to go. She picked her spot next to the bed and she was waiting it out. I think she would have passed by the end of June if we had given her that privilege. By not eating or drinking, she would have quietly euthanized herself ahead of the mass getting too big.

After Merly died, my husband’s aunt told me stories about how her cat and dogs had died. Both just disappeared into the woods behind her house and were never seen again. They never found the bodies. Her other dog kept moving out to the driveway, which is as far as he could get. She’d carry him back to the garage, and he’d drag himself back outside again. They want to die outside, away from people, away from everything, by themselves. Goodbye. It’s been nice. Time for the woods. Or under the bed.

The couple of times I took Merly outside during the last couple of weeks, she walked slowly to the edge of the yard and then sat down with her back to the house. The first time she had enough strength to roll over on her back and let the warmth of the sun touch her one last time. Watching her, I prayed she would die right then. It seemed like the perfect moment, but she didn’t.

The next time was a disaster. She was in such a weakened condition, with her stools leaking, that flies were landing on her. They left maggots in her, which meant another trip to the vet to pull them out of her anus. He tried to make it sound like a good thing. “Maggots eat the diseased tissue,” but how can having maggots in you ever be a good thing? So that was the end of her going outside. By that time, Merly was really fed up with our interfering with her death.

She had chosen the date – end of June – and the place, under the bed. Here it was the middle of July, and I was carrying her around the house, wrapped in a towel to catch the anal seepage, because I didn’t want her to die alone.   All she wanted to do was die alone and I was getting in the way.

I feel bad about that now.

Maybe if I had not rehydrated her, had not kept forcing her to eat, not kept squirting water down her throat with a syringe, she would have died peacefully before the tumor got as big as a sweet potato, according to the vet the last time we took her in. Maybe she wouldn’t have had the seizures, or at least would have died after the first one. But no, I had fortified her body to keep going, and it took eight seizures to weaken her to death. And even then I couldn’t bring myself to rush her to the vet and have her put down. She didn’t like riding in the car. She didn’t like the vet. It was the middle of the night. I kept telling myself all these excuses. I wanted her to die at home in my arms.

But that had not been her choice. She wanted to die alone under the bed when we were sleeping, and she wanted to go before things got too bad.

I feel guilty that I didn’t let her.

After the first seizure, she never really looked at anything like she was seeing it, or made any noise, so she might have been only technically alive those last hours, but even then, she waited until I finally left her alone for a minute to go to the kitchen and get a donut. The short time I was gone, that’s when she died.

That’s all she had ever wanted, to be left alone.

I feel so bad about what I did to her, which was I did too much when she wanted none of it.

Regrets of a Multi-Cat Household

2009-09-03T20:53:00.001-04:00

Ever since Merly died, there's been a disturbance in the force -- the cats are behaving differently. For instance, Arbee, who had lived with Merly the entire time she's been with us, seems liberated all of a sudden. She's no longer hidden somewhere in the house. She's often out in plain view, even making contact with the other cats.

Did Merly intimidate her for a decade and I didn't know?

Merly's death has given me a lot to think about regarding the disadvantages of having too many cats. We were slow to notice her weight loss. Although I suspected the foul smelling stools, sometimes flecked with blood, belonged to her, I could never be sure. I did take her to the vet because of them four years ago, but there were no other indications of a problem then. The one time I noticed she had some anal leakage, I didn't do anything about it because it didn't recur. I wonder now if Merly had been my only cat, if I would have acted sooner on that.

The problem, though, is most testing on animals to find out if something is amiss is very upsetting to them. They don't understand, and you cannot explain, what is happening to them or why, that if you leave them with the vet, you're coming back. Because I give my cats feelings and thoughts which they probably don't actually have, this prevented me from seeking medical help sooner.

Also, I could not monitor her stools, her vomiting, or even if she was eating normally because with seven other cats, you don't know who is doing what unless they do it in front of you.

So we let her lose almost half her body weight before we took her to a doctor. The other problem was because she had always been obese, at half her body weight, she looked like a normal cat. I should have known something was profoundly wrong when I felt the lumps of her spine on her back -- that meant she was losing muscle mass as well. I let things get too advanced.

Grieving Merly

2009-07-25T14:19:00.008-04:00

The night Merly was dying my husband had band practice and he didn't cancel it. During Merly's frightening first seizure, I could hear the music and laughter downstairs.

He can compartmentalize his emotions. I suspect most men can. But the fact that they can turn it on or off doesn’t subtract from the sincerity of the emotion. I believe he did hurt. That’s something women don’t understand about men. We tend to marinate a long time in our emotions. I can sustain being unhappy, depressed, bitter, angry, or revengeful. I can wear it like a floppy hat obscuring my face. I can manifest positive emotions as well, but their shelf life is much shorter.

All through the month that Merly was slowly melting away of whatever killed her (cancer, pancreatitis, FIP, does it matter?) he could sit with her and look profoundly sad, and then he could go downstairs and watch television…or sleep at night. He could talk about other things. He could do other things. I could only huddle around the cat, frantically trying to figure out a way out of this for both of us. At the end, I couldn’t even go to work. I stayed huddled with Merly for the last three days, day and night. I didn’t sleep. Sometimes she would look at me like, “Please go away so I can die. You know I can’t do it with you staring at me.”

Last night, after sitting silently over bowls of soup at Panera, I finally asked him the question that had been irritating me like a bug bite since the incident happened. “After you saw her have the seizure, why didn’t you say let’s take her to Carytown and have her put down?”

When band practice ended and his friends went home, he came back upstairs where I was sitting with Meryl on the sofa. The seizure had been over for about an hour, but she was trying to push her head under the sofa cushion and was gently paddling her feet. I told him what had happened, and he immediately folded into sadness and sat next to her, petting her. After awhile, he said, “I think she’s trying to climb off the sofa.”

So I picked her up and put her on the floor, arranging her body like the Egyptian Sphinx. She briefly held her head up, then started wobbling, and then horribly, the second seizure started. “Don’t touch her,” my husband said alarmed, but we both moved to the floor and hovered over her, our palms open as if we were trying to catch the seizure and toss it away as it bounced over her body. After it ended, she was again limp and exhausted, and didn’t seem to notice us anymore, or care. I thought for sure my husband would say, “Grab your purse and keys, we have to go to the vet now. It’s time.”

Instead, he said he was going to bed. And he did. And he slept.

I picked up Meryl and went downstairs to the futon where we had been restlessly sleeping for the last five nights, but every morning when the sun came up, Merly would lift her head for another day. The seizures were not a good sign, but so many other nights when she had gotten so still that I thought she was gone, I had been wrong. Maybe I’d be wrong again. So we bundled up together on the futon and waited.

There would be eight more seizures that night before the dawn. You could set your watch by their regularity. Sometimes I thought I should jump in the car and drive to the emergency vet by myself and be done with it. I knew he would be upset when he found out, but if he couldn’t make the decision, someone had to. But then I couldn’t either. The seizure would end and she’d be peaceful again, asleep and breathing quietly. I would think, okay, that’s the last one.

But it wouldn’t be the last one. By 3 a.m., the craziness set in. Maybe it’s not a tumor, but a cyst that is breaking open, and once it drains, she’ll be all better? She’ll wake up her old self! This is just the poison leaving her body! All is well!

That trickery lasted a couple of seizures. Then I went to negotiations. God, end this. End this or cure this. I want a dead cat or a well cat right now. Work a miracle. You can do it! You are God! Do it. What good is being God if you don’t do stuff like this? Now, now, do it, now!

That didn’t work either, although the seizures from 4 a.m. on were less violent. Her head didn’t shake. Her mouth didn’t open. Only her legs would paddle furiously, like she was running somewhere. Then less furiously, slowing down to a trot, like she was arriving somewhere.

The sun came up. I could hear my husband upstairs waking up. Another day had started. The cat was still breathing, although asleep. Her body was strangely warm in places, cool in others. I kept checking her. If I rubbed an ear, it would twitch. If I rubbed a paw, it would flinch. Or maybe that was my imagination. My husband came downstairs.

“How is she?” he said, ready to be sad. I dully, bitterly reported the eight seizures, the night of no sleep. He just said, “oh, man.” He petted her for a while, and then he was able to switch it off again, go upstairs and start the coffee. I hoped all the normal morning noises would provoke a response in the cat. It’s morning! Breakfast time! Lift your head again like you do every morning when you hear his voice! Like you did yesterday!

Nothing.

I wrapped her in a towel and moved her upstairs to my bed. Now that she had survived another night, it was my turn to get some sleep. My husband could watch over her. Her body felt limper than usual, but it was still warm and she was still breathing. I put her head on the pillow and pulled the blanket up to her chin. I went in the kitchen to get a donut and went back to my bed. That’s when I noticed the look.

I had two cats die on me years ago, one at age 18 and one at 17, both at home, and I knew right away it was a dead cat, not a sleeping cat when I saw them. Their mouth opens just a little. This look was different than the one she had when I went for the donut. I tried rubbing the ears, the paws, nothing moved now. She was still warm in parts, cool in others. I couldn’t see breathing anymore. The vet had said to watch the eyes at the end. I shined a flashlight in her dilated pupils and they didn’t contract. They didn’t move. My insides starting folding in on me like a collapsing house of cards.

I went to the front door and opened it. My husband had just finished watering the bushes and was talking to the neighbors. I let him be happy until the neighbors drove away. He turned around and saw me in the doorway. I couldn’t find the words, but I guess my flailing hands and collapsing face said them for me. He ran into the house.

I did my crazy act. “Maybe it’s a coma. You think it’s a coma?” And he was realistic. “She’s gone. She’s gone.” And we cried, again hovering our hands over her like we could catch her spirit leaving and stuff it back in. For the rest of the day, we solemnly went through the ritual. Finding a box. Deciding where to bury her. Getting the shovels and picks together. Picking up favorite items to put in the box with her. Looking at photos of her and printing them to put inside the box, photos of us with her so she wouldn’t forget us.

He was able to turn the ritual off long enough to go to McDonald’s and get us food, food I couldn’t taste although I tried to eat it. Then we went to the woods for the burial, a story in itself for another day, and it was over. I haven’t seen him cry since and he’s been fine, like it was something that happened a long time ago to someone else. That is, until I asked him the question at Panera’s.

“After you saw her have a seizure, why didn’t you say, let’s take her to Carytown and have her put down?”

The muscles in his face started moving like there was an earthquake under his skin. His facial features sucked themselves inward as if I had literally punched him. It all happened in a fleeting half a second and I would have missed it if I hadn’t been looking right at him. The emotion exploded and was contained that quickly. He put his head down so I couldn’t see anymore and mumbled something that sounded like, “I couldn’t…”

I quickly changed the subject because that had been answer enough. Maybe that’s how men deal with strong emotion. They compartmentalize it; they turn it off. It's the instinct of war where you can't mourn a fallen comrade for even a second because the battle continues all around you and you have to continue. They’re able to, in the face of a painful decision, just not make it and go to bed. And sleep. He had left that hard decision to me, knowing with my high threshold for pain and drama, even if I couldn’t make it either, I could endure the consequences of our not making it. I’d take care of it. I’d absorb it all and suck the pain right out of the air for him.

I’ve read about couples who lose young children. It is very difficult to keep the marriage together after that. The divorce rate is high, as if the only way to escape the memory is to escape the relationship that created the child that died. I had a friend whose marriage collapsed after their son died. I look at the marriage of John and Elizabeth Edwards and know they were damaged irrevocably when their son died, and nothing they’ve done since has fixed it for them, not having more children or running for President, or even having an affair.

I have to accept that we mourn differently. He can put his pain away and be happy again. If I keep poking at it, I can force him to hurt and cry for me, but as soon as he can, he’ll shut it down and move on. The first weekend after Merly died, he went away with friends to play music and swim in the sun. No one will talk about the cat there. If he had stayed here with me, we would talk about Merly, because I’m wearing the pain like a big floppy hat that gets in the way of everything else I need to do. I would want to talk about what we did wrong; what we should have done; the clues we missed that she was sick. I would rehash it over and over, even though I can't change the outcome now. Even if I said nothing, he can tell by looking at me that I’m thinking about it.

He doesn't want to do that. He wants to live his life. That is not a bad thing.

If I keep wearing this misery hat, eventually he’s going to forget that it’s about the cat and think I’m just a miserable person in general. Another woman will come along who is happy and laughing, and she will seem like a much better person to be with, and he will be right. She’ll be able to taste and enjoy food, laugh at bad jokes, want to go out with his friends, and embrace him without thinking that the last time they hugged, it was over the cat. Never in her life will it ever cross her mind to blame him for making her sit alone through the night, through eight seizures, because that will not be in their history.

Maybe it’s women in general or maybe it’s just me. Maybe realizing how we’re different and accepting it is half the battle. He’s going to be all right. I need to take off this hat and put it in its own box.

From the Book: Introduction to Merly

2009-07-19T13:07:00.003-04:00

This is an edited, past tense excerpt from the chapter of the book where I introduced Merly.

Whereas our cat Red is light and nearly flies when she walks, Merly was the opposite, obese and waddling, with short gray hair. Merly originally and unfortunately was named Booger, a kitten acquired by a woman who soon discovered she was pregnant, so my sister-in-law volunteered to find Booger a home. Booger was in bad shape, sickly and afflicted with fleas, worms, mites and runny eyes. Everyone who offered to adopt Booger promptly rejected her when they saw her. So my husband took her.

Bobby’s sister had renamed her Merlin from the King Arthur stories for reasons no one knows, yet spelled it Merly and pronounced it “Mer-lynn,” the emphasis on the second syllable. Bobby acquired Merly around the same time as Red, so they became playmates and groomed each other until their kittenhood wore off. After that, they paid no attention to each other.

We called her “Mer-lee.” She needed a lot of attention to survive and she got it and remained devoted to my husband. She was briefly a normal sized cat until she was fixed (and discovered to be pregnant during the operation, as was Red.) She not only didn’t lose her baby weight after losing the babies, she gained weight until her legs nearly disappeared. She ate any brand or flavor of cat food, which may be why she was so fat, but with six others competing for food, I don't know how she maintained her size over the years.

She liked going outside, but it didn't take much to make her frantically want to come back inside where she was perfectly happy to sit in view of the food bowls or look out the window. We figured she knew she couldn't move very fast, so she stayed aware of anything that might possibly require a fast get-away and got away before it had to be done fast. She reminded me of a possum.

When we lived in the rental house, she slept on top of our bed's bookcase headboard because there was a window there that looked out over the woods. When we moved to the house we bought, she slept under the bed. She was very needy sometimes. She wanted to be in the bathroom if you were, in front of the computer if you were working on it, next to the sofa if you were watching TV. She followed us around, asking the same insistent question which we didn't understand. I think she just wanted us to stop walking and sit down. She was especially insistent about this when I get out of the shower. She desperately needed to sit on my chest when I was warm, damp and smelled like soap.

The last couple of years, she stopped doing most of that except still maintained a vigil on the dining room table so she'd be first to inspect the food bowls when they were refilled. If she wasn't hungry, she had a favorite window. And whenever I spread the bills out on the breakfast bar and brought out the checkbook, she wanted to sit on the bills and rub her face against my pen. That was very annoying because until she tired of that game, I couldn't get anything done.

The last favorite thing she did was roll. When she was outside, she'd roll on the warm cement and wiggle.

Merly Leaves Us

2009-07-18T22:38:00.002-04:00

Merly died on the morning of July 15, 2009. She was between 13 and 14 years old. I will write more about her later. It's just not possible now.

Merly on Monday

2009-06-29T13:52:00.003-04:00

I think it's telling that I am often unsure how to spell this cat's name. It was named by my husband's sister. It has something to do with the wizard Merlin, and I think it was originally Merlyn, but got shortened to Merly. His family often has issues with pet names. They evolve and change. He tends to call all the male cats "Buddy" anyway.

The surgery has been postponed for now. They found fluid in her stomach they tapped to run more tests, but the third vet to look at her suspects several masses in her intestines. I'm thinking there is also some bad reason she tilts her head all the way to the side to drink water now.

I knew something bad was coming a couple of months ago when she was dancing on the table when I was trying to do my weekly bills, just like always, and when she left, my bills were flecked with tiny brown spots. That was probably the beginning of the blockage.

Merly on Sunday

2009-06-28T22:54:00.005-04:00

My prayer today was that Merly would die on the deck while she was stretching out in the warm sun, really enjoying all the things she likes about the backyard. The prayer was that God would let her go peacefully in a favorite place. That didn't happen, and tomorrow morning we have to keep the appointment for exploratory surgery, so I am hoping that this means the second part of my prayer will be answered, that if she has to go through it, she'll survive it and thrive again.

Distractions

2009-06-25T23:25:00.003-04:00

Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett died today, which totally took my mind off the possibility one of my cats is also dying. She is down to 9 pounds from 14, and we don't have much evidence she is eating or using the litter box. We drove back to our old vet across town because he's the best, and I think he's mentally preparing us for intestinal tumors, even though he gave a range of possibilities.

Even though I have had this cat for almost 14 years, I seem to have just four photos of her. Merly was never the cutest, just the heaviest and the hungriest and sometimes the most emotionally needy. Otherwise, she kept to herself. It is sad seeing her get so thin.

Five Books Sold!

2009-02-23T20:45:00.002-05:00

I received a 1099-Misc in the mail today for royalty income and I could not figure out what it was, until it dawned on me maybe someone actually bought my book (same name as this blog) on Amazon Kindle. Apparently I sold five copies last summer. The royalty deposit was so small, $11.20, I didn't notice it had gone into my checking account.

Anyway, thank you if you were one of the buyers.

Spraying -- Desperately Seeking Cure

2009-02-15T13:06:00.002-05:00

I started a Facebook group to find people with spraying cats to explore solutions.

Meanwhile, "Dewey," the book about the library cat, has been on the bestseller list for several weeks now, so...

All My Hopes are Kindled

2008-07-13T17:23:00.002-04:00

I put the manuscript of the book on Amazon's Kindle for a $7.99 download. I only have to sell 6,258 downloads of it and all my problems are solved, although I don't know the cut Amazon takes, so maybe I'll have to sell 7,000 downloads.

That's going to be quite a job. I know J.K. Rowling didn't start like this.

The Original Preface to the Book

2008-02-14T19:37:00.004-05:00

This is the original preface to my cat book, which doesn't seem to be going over very well with the agents. I thought I had to start with a dramatic scene, and then follow with some research explaining where I was going with the book. I guess this is a bad idea. I tried rewriting it, but then decided I didn't need it at all. So I post the rewritten preface here, and abandon it.

A Life in Cats
Preface

Going to the pet store is always hard. This evening it was harder because I’d been rebuffed trying to overmother my son and the cats in the store cages this evening were particularly pathetic. They seemed to all need a mother, and I was willing to serve.

(The original preface is actually a couple of pages of the overmothering incident. My son will be glad I chose to dump this.)

A cat rescue lifts me into another realm where I am noble and sacrificing. All my travails fall away, at least temporarily, as I pour out love and succor to yet another cat. I’m a nurturer, a problem-solver, a fixer, always wanting to wade in and right every disorder. It’s the classic breeding ground for cat hoarding. When things are broken – relationships, people, contraptions, hearts -- I can’t stand it until they’re fixed or replaced.

An older kitten in the rescue society’s cages caught my eye. Well, he’s cute. He’ll find a home soon, I smiled, but then….in the cage next to him was a huge, sleeping white cat, her shaved belly facing the glass, a gruesome surgical scar across it. Oh. my gosh, what happened to her?

The card on the cage said she had been rescued from the shelter – probably on execution day, which was the rescue club’s modus operandi. She had recently had kittens, but they all died. How could that happen? Why the scar? The urge to grab her out of the cage was enveloping me like a fog, so I quickly turned away, but there was another cat with a surgical scar. “Found injured and wandering loose at the Taco Bell,” his card said. Who is going to adopt these cats? Who has the heart for such cursed cats except me?

All the while, my husband stood at the counter, offering his credit card for the weekly $100 worth of supplies we couldn’t afford for the eight cats we already have.

It’ll be hours, maybe days before I can shake off the need to get all the cats I saw at the store. I have to be strong. But when everything else around me is falling apart, strong too often translates into what is easy, and that’s getting another cat.

This is how it begins. I am on the way. The typical animal hoarder is a middle-aged to elderly white female. They have a problem letting go of anything and cannot face the thought that an unwanted animal might be euthanized, or in my case, even adopted by people who won’t take proper care of them. Psychologists suspect many hoarders had chaotic childhoods and unstable parents. They look to animals for the unconditional love they still desire.
That would be me.

Hoarders need animals under their control, yet they don’t always have the best interests of the animals in mind when they can’t afford to medically care for every one of them.

There’s no cure for this. When cat hoarders are discovered, arrested, separated from their cats, treated and released, they start all over again. The recidivism rate is 100 percent, even with counseling!

(Here, thinking I had to justify the book's premise, I presented several case studies of cat hoarders. They were all pretty gruesome. Maybe that's why one of the agents who gave me the most attention ultimately said to come back when I had a funny book.)

One story that entranced me was about a professional woman in California who rented apartments and office space, and then filled them with cats. She had more than 600. She successfully argued her own case before the courts, and as soon as she was released, started hoarding again.

How do you end up with 600 cats? How does something like that begin? This is how.

(The next chapter was like a second first chapter, an overview of the madness we live in now with the cats. I've edited that chapter down, but now I'm wondering if I should just plunge in with the beginning of my life in cats and get on with it. In any case, by the time I finish this second editing of the entire book, I'm going to post it on Kindle.)

Another Close Call with Agents

2007-12-20T14:36:00.000-05:00

I had the perfect storm going. I queried an agent with whom I had a remote connection. At the writer's conference we were told figuring out some kind of connection with an agent is vital if you want them to read past your first paragraph. She had sold a book in which I was a character. That got my foot in the door. Another person in the agency asked for the proposal by email. Door is staying open. A third person in the agency tells me he was given the proposal; that his mother has five cats, and he wants to see a sample. Door still open, even though I can tell I've been bounced down to the junior agent, but I heard at the conference that they're the ones who'll try the hardest.

I never know what to send. It's not like one chapter is stronger than another. It's all one big story. A few parts can stand alone, and I usually send them, but it's hard to get a grasp of the book's scope when you read about one cat, when the book is really about a long chain of cat encounters that somehow make the bridge of my life's journey.

Usually I send Neelix's chapters, but this time I went with Arbee. Two days later, I got the not-for-us email. And you know, I've been disappointed so much in life, it's pretty much what I expect (time to get another cat?!), but this time I cannot give up. This is all I have now. This is the last rescue attempt I can launch, so I have to keep trying. I just don't know where I'm going to find this miraculous agent that I miraculously connect with and who embraces the book.

My online buddy says I should self-publish, but it's not about getting published so much as making a small, temporary windfall that will put us back on a level playing field and give me an identity for my last years since I failed to get a career going early enough in my life to benefit from one. I can be the Crazy Cat Lady. I still have time to do that. I have to believe all these kitties were sent to save me, which would be ironic since I thought I was saving them.

Postscript: After I wrote this and went home, I found another rejection in my mail. Wow, bad day.

Make it Funny

2007-10-28T18:01:00.000-04:00

I went to the James River Writer's Conference this year. I sold stuff on eBay to raise the money for the admission fee. Part of the package was five minutes with an agent. Of the three agents taking appointments, I had already been rejected by two via mail last year.

The third was immediately encouraging, telling me a book proposal about an Iowa library cat who had just died sold for $1.25 million dollars. (I'm sorry, but that book is not going to sell that well. It's one cat that lives in a library.) She gave me her card and said I could send the proposal. I imagine she does that with all 20 people who interviewed with her during the conference. How do you say no when you're face to face?

I sent the proposal; they asked for three chapters. My first two chapters are not the strongest since they have to set up the whole book. I do open with a family story, but then it's on to the set-up. I never know which chapter to pick after the first, since they all seem equally balanced.

Anyway, Mollie, the "reader" for this agent, wanted a funnier book. My book is funny, just not hilarious from the very first word. It alternates funny and tragic, as all lives with pets do. I can think of a different way to approach the book opening and I'll work on it. And I've changed the name of the book from The Evolution of a Crazy Cat Lady to the less serious Confessions of a Crazy Cat Lady. I need a less busy life so I can attend to these things. I still haven't learned Final Cut Express, either.

Meanwhile, Kira has minor diarrhea, after a day of serious diarrhea, so she's going to Hanover next week to the doctor who successfully cured Chatterbox.

(And he fixed her with some probiotics and a little medicine. She loved the probiotics sprinkled on her food, but it's too expensive to buy regularly. I guess I should keep making the long drive to this vet. And I sold Final Cut Express and gave up. I'll just have to hope I can save for a new iMac that can run iMovie8.)

The Cat Turns On Me

2007-07-17T14:55:00.000-04:00

Maybe I engage in risky behaviors when my husband is away playing a gig hoping something bad will happen to me and he'll feel bad that he wasn't there to save me and never leave me again. I swim alone in the dark. I let the cats out. And I am determined to bring them all back in before he comes home, even though it would be easier to leave the problem cases out until he came home and let him deal with it. They come right to him when he calls anyway. And by 3 in the morning, they're more than ready to come in. At midnight, the party is just getting started.

Saturday night I swam in the dark alone. Only Arbee was out, and I held the downstairs door open for her to come in. Unless she's spooked by something, she takes a very long time to decide whether or not to come in. Outside she has the whole backyard and no one to bother her. Inside, she usually has to spend her time under the bed or crouched behind the litter boxes to keep from getting into unprovoked spats with other cats. She doesn't care for cats or people.

I thought I was safe because the whole time I was floating in the pool, I could see all the other cats in upstairs windows staring at me, wondering why I was out with the crickets in the dark and they weren't. Arbee was still contemplating whether or not to come in when out of nowhere Seven and Chatter made the trip downstairs and shot out the door. I chased after Seven because once out, he's gone or at least I can't catch him. He won't come to me. Chatter answers to his name and docilely lets you pick him up.

As Seven shot by, I reached down and grabbed his tail. He didn't like that and let me know it, but I didn't want to let him go into the night. I held on. Big mistake. He flipped around and sunk his teeth into my lower leg and grabbed the rest of my leg with all his claws and gave me a good rake. Then, for good measure, he nipped my wrist and slapped Chatter in the face a few times just for standing too close.

I let go of his tail. He took off over the fence. Damn. That hurt. And now I'm gushing blood. I bleed all over the bathroom floor. In the bathtub, it looks like "Psycho" going down the drain. It won't stop bleeding. Now I'm sitting on the floor with the bandages box, slapping them on. One, two, gauze pad, tape, more gauze, more tape. It takes a wad to finally contain the blood. My flip flops are soaked through.

Now I have an inner debate for the next 30 minutes to an hour. Should I go to the emergency room? Do I need stitches? Will I get infected and have to have my leg amputated? That decides it. I balance spending $100 on the co-payment or losing a leg and the $100 wins. But first I still have to get the cats in. Chatter and Arbee now come in easily. I guess the commotion convinced Arbee. Seven is nowhere to be found, even though I hobble up and down the street a couple of times with a flashlight.

I take a book and go to St. Mary's, enjoying the idea that I'll be sitting in an emergency room all night and meanwhile Bobby will come home and find the bathroom and hallway covered in blood, me gone, and he'll decide to give up music and never leave me again. Only St. Mary's busy night is Monday, not Saturday. This hospital doesn't get the gunshots or car accidents. I'm in and out in an hour with new bandages and a tetanus shot. I didn't even need stitches. It isn't even bleeding anymore.

By the time Bobby comes home, I'm in bed asleep. Because I left the backyard lights on, he knows someone is still out. He wakes me up. "Who's out?"

"Seven." I am too tired to tell my story, and I figure he'll see all the blood and wake me up anyway, vowing never to leave me alone again.

He doesn't wake me up again. In the morning, I find myself alone in the bed. He never came to bed, never even saw the upstairs bathroom. I find him asleep on the sofa downstairs. I wake him up. "Seven didn't come back until 5:30," he complains.

"Look what he did to my leg!" Somehow, my story isn't as powerful now, balanced against the fact he sat up all night waiting for Seven to come back. He'll probably keep leaving me alone.

While I type this, Seven, as huge as a dog, sits on my lap as if he never tried to kill me. I guess he doesn't know it was me who grabbed him by the tail when he was escaping into the night.

Rhapsody in Cats

2007-07-14T20:16:00.000-04:00

Book Progress

2007-06-28T17:35:00.000-04:00

An agent in California asked to see two chapters. Out of about 20 queries, this is the second semi-positive reply. The first one, I never heard from her after she asked to see the manuscript.

Seven vs. Bird

2007-05-18T16:32:00.000-04:00

Wrestling with Neelix

2007-04-04T15:07:00.001-04:00

Baby Neelix

2007-04-04T15:06:00.001-04:00

Neelix was a sick kitten. We didn't know from day-to-day if he was going to live.

Neelix Helps in the Office

2007-04-04T15:05:00.001-04:00

Sulu Plays the Windchimes

2007-04-04T15:03:00.000-04:00

Seven and Kira, Son and Mother

2007-03-06T22:09:00.000-05:00

Just a Nub

2007-03-06T22:07:00.000-05:00

The hair has grown back on Chatter's nub of a tail. (See older entries about why he lost his tail.) When a neighbor cat jumped over our fence, he puffed the hair on his tail out in defensive mode. My husband said it looked like a little rabbit tail.

A Little More Chill

2007-03-06T22:04:00.000-05:00

Letting Arbee have more outdoor time has made her a happier cat. And she doesn't freak out anymore. It's easier to get her to come back inside. She has let go of another one of her feral instincts, but you still can't pick her up.

Merly Needs to Lose Weight

2007-03-06T22:02:00.000-05:00

The Brothers Run a Vet Bill on Routine Stuff!

2007-01-23T08:14:00.000-05:00

I tried a new vet, Allied, which is the second closest to our house, and it wasn't particularly a warm and friendly place. They have great hours, all day Saturday and Sunday evening, but now I suspect the vets may not be there then. It may just be for pick up and dropping off at the attached kennel.

I got the usual chilly response when I confessed to having eight cats. Why do I keep doing that? I turned down the fecal exams and ear cleanings, but caved in to the FELV shots when all I wanted was rabies. Got distemper shots, too, and they say Sulu has a tapeworm. You'd never know it by his size. So that meant two courses of tapeworm medication for both him and Seven and a flea and parasite medication, and the warning that all the cats need it. Just the flea part would be $100 for all of them. As it was, the bill was $315.

After we came into a small inheritance before Christmas that paid off Chatter's vet bills, now I find myself back in the hole. This is definitely the problem with too many cats. If I had one, I could indulge it with everything the vet had to offer. With eight, I have to pick and choose.

Cat in the Night

2006-12-26T13:00:00.000-05:00

Christmas night, we were leaving West Point for New Kent, and stopped in the empty Hardee's parking lot to look at a Christmas present, and my husband had to point out that a cat, bigger than a kitten but smaller than a full grown cat, was nosing around the parking lot perimeter. He was a solid, dark color. I was scared to get out of the car and approach it because it was too close to the highway and might run in the wrong direction. So off he went to his own fate, and I felt bad for many miles about what would become of that cat...

....until we hit a possum. Then I got to feel really bad about that.

Strange Days

2006-12-12T11:08:00.000-05:00

Neelix came back from the vet a changed cat last month. As usual, a trip to the vet is followed by a horrendous head cold, so I blamed his lethargy on that for the first two weeks, but when the cold subsided, and he was still doing nothing but sleeping in our bed all day and all night, and losing weight in the process, I started to get concerned. Is he having side effects from the rabies and distemper vaccinations? He felt warm and had tremors. But now that is subsiding, but still, he spends all day and night sleeping on an electric blanket I arranged for him on the sofa. His weight loss is scaring me, since that's how Yoda and Niki died, but they were 18 and 17 years old. He's only about 5.

We took the cone off Chatterbox. His tail has grown some hair back and except for one corner, the incision seems to be healed, although he has to go back to the vet to see if there's any sutures left to remove.

Another $100 Invested in the Tail That is No More

2006-11-19T13:30:00.000-05:00

Friday afternoon, my husband got home from work to find Chatter had gotten his collar off and pulled out a couple of stitches, leaving his wound open on the corner and looking like an oozing jelly donut. I was hoping he was exaggerating, but when I got home, I conceded we had to go back to Lakeside. Another $100 to have him restitched. At least these stitches look tighter. And he got a plastic cone and some painkiller liquid.

The plastic cone keeps him from opening his mouth, it is so tight. When he got home, he squatted in front of the food bowl, his plastic cone sitting in the food, but there was no way he could position himself to actually reach food or even open his mouth. We took it off.

A little while later, the vet called and asked how things were going, even though we had just been home a little while. I told her about the cone and food problem. "Oh yeah, you can take it off for him to eat."

Actually, he hasn't worn it since. Even my husband thinks it is too harsh and has him back in the soft cone. We are going to find some Velcro somewhere and try to redesign it so at least he can open his mouth.

The $1,000 Tail

2006-11-15T21:20:00.000-05:00

Chatterbox lost his tail. It's a long story I might save for the book, but we had to rush him to Carytown Emergency Vet at midnight because his tail was literally hanging by what appeared to be a white thread. How did we go so wrong with the wound care? If the vet assistant at Lakeside hadn't nicked his tail when she was shaving it, would this have happened? We picked him up the next morning at 6:30 a.m., with just an inch-long stub left of his lovely tail. He has to wear the damn collar until the stitches are out. He wants to pull the stitches out himself, so this time we have to be strong and keep it on.

The bill was $650. Ouch. Ouch. Add to that the several previous bills and money spent on bandages and ointments, and we've got a thousand invested in a tail we lost. (Look at the picture. The tail seemed to be doing okay. How did we go from this to no tail at all?)

Did you see the woman on "Dr. Phil" today with 200 cats? At least she had 10 acres and was getting them all neutered, but still the neighbors are mad. Dr. Phil said she had to find homes for those cats, but I could tell the very idea of it was killing her. She knew all their names. I bet she doesn't part with them. We never do.

Cats Abound at Grey Gardens

2006-11-05T10:55:00.000-05:00

I just watched the documentary "Grey Gardens" about Jackie Kennedy's crazy relatives in their run-down house, and it wasn't about their cats, it was just about being crazy, but there were a lot of cats around. Craziness and cats seem to go together.

Another Rejection

2006-10-15T15:59:00.000-04:00

I got a two sentence form letter from the Barbara Braun Associates, Inc. literary agency, and they started the second sentence with "But." Isn't that really one sentence? "Thanks for submitting your proposal, but I'm afraid I receive many submissions, and I can only represent a limited number of them." Instead she starts a second sentence with the "But I'm afraid..."

I guess she's an agent, not a writer. Her signature, and scratching in my full name and the date in the fill-in-the-blank-areas, looked like a much older woman still using an ink cartridge pen.

Meanwhile, my brother sends me the Web site of the New York Literary Agency, referred to him by one of his persistent fans who thought it would be good for my book. You fill in a Web site form as a query. Well, that makes it easier. But within hours, I get a form letter reply asking to see the whole manuscript. I do a Google search on this agency and find a forum complaining about it. They like everyone's manuscripts, and pretty much sign everyone to a contract, wherein you have agreed to get critiques, editing help and a Web site, all for fees, as part of the process of just trying to find a publisher. They even take Paypal. How convenient.

So I guess I will pass on them.

Reality vs. Vetworld

2006-10-15T15:56:00.000-04:00

In what alternative universe has any cat kept this collar on longer than it takes for him to pull it off? Why do vets think they are going to wear it?

Taking It in the Butt

2006-10-15T15:45:00.000-04:00

I think my husband overreacts, maybe because he's never had children. I just don't want to run to the vet with every new development. Let's see if the cat gets obviously worse, or maybe it will get better on its own! But my husband gets wound up and I end up riding along on the panic train.

So we've spent another $78 on Chatterbox's tail with no real reason. The cut had turned into what looked like a big raw area, probably because he was licking it and pulled a scab off. So they shaved his tail completely and want him to wear one of those collars. They gave us two more bottles of antibiotic and a cleansing lotion and said to come back in four days.

That's crazy. I'm not paying for another office visit after only four days unless he is dramatically worse. Four days isn't enough time to get even a little better. Maybe when we're done with the antibiotic and it still looks bad.

My husband keeps trying to put that collar on him -- we had one from last time Chatterbox was hurt, so I saved $15 on that -- and he keeps pulling it off. The first time he got one leg through it and was walking crazy, with one leg in front of the collar and one behind. The second time he got both legs through it so the collar was sitting at his waist like a skirt. At first, he couldn't walk out of a room with it on because he couldn't turn a corner.

Chatterbox Injures His Tail

2006-10-09T07:17:00.000-04:00

The bill was $217 and I almost wanted to throw up when I put Chatterbox back in the car. And he didn't even break his tail. The x-rays show all the bones are in place. "Soft tissue damage," the vet thought. Worst case scenario is his tail remains deadweight and he doesn't recognize it anymore as part of him and starts to attack it, but so far he's been cleaning it himself and it has regained a little movement. He can move it an inch or so away from his legs, just not lift it.

But I can't remember Chatterbox ever being very expressive with his tail. We have no idea what happened to it. He went out on Saturday morning for a short while, came back in, and growled when you touched him. We noticed the tail was just hanging limp. By the time I got to the vet, there was a little bit of blood in the cage, but not as much after the vet assistant nicked his tail while shaving it. Then it was gushing. The vet, a new one in Lakeside, was very apologetic, so I liked her for that. So he got a big bandage until the nick stopped bleeding.

For a few days, he took a liquid painkiller and an antibiotic. Now he's still on the antibiotic and a pill. We have about three days more of that. The easiest way to give him his medicine is for Bobby to hold him over his shoulder. He takes it easily from me that way if he's in daddy's arms.

How you can tell you're getting crazy

2006-09-24T01:25:00.000-04:00

This is how you can tell when you are crossing the line to being full-fledged crazy cat lady. Your husband tells you sternly that we now have enough cats. No matter how sad their story is, you're not getting another cat. I used to agree with him, but now I know in my heart, if there is a sad story, I will probably end up with another cat.

My son yells that if my husband dies first, he is going to take all the cats to the pound and put me in a home. I fear this as a real possibility. I see that bleak notice on the cat cages in PetSmart all the time. "Owner had to move into a nursing home and could not keep cat." I don't want my cats to end up that way. Somehow I have to time it right that I can outlive them all, and at a certain point in my life, not get any more.

I'd rather stay home with the cats than do anything else. I am like the head Meerkat and this is my tribe. I like to just hang out with them, to know where they're all at. I have no interest in taking trips, even overnight, anywhere. I'm content to stay home with the cats.

I got an email from a person who saw this blog and said he/she would buy my book when it came out. So that's one. They gave me the addresses of two book publishers, but both of them only buy from agents. Thanks, but I need an agent, not the address of a publisher. Getting an agent is easily a part-time job. Sending the proposal out once a month isn't getting me anywhere.

It's All Pee Now

2006-09-24T01:18:00.000-04:00

I've noticed that lately, 80 percent of what my husband and I talk about is urine. Which cat peed where? What are we going to do about it? Do you smell pee? Here? Here? Over here? "I found out where the cat peed!" My son always yells that the house stinks, so I ask visitors -- who are getting fewer and fewer -- does the house smell like pee? I almost let the Mormons in today to see if they could smell pee.

The problems are Neelix, the angry sprayer, and Kira, the cat who lived outside too long and just hasn't made the adjustment to not going wherever she feels like it. I don't know if anyone else in the cat crew are joining in, but I can imagine the poor soul who will one day have to try to sell this house for us. "They had eight cats."

The Back End of Life

2006-09-02T23:58:00.000-04:00

I put Neelix out in his mesh cage earlier in the evening, then forgot he was out there. When I looked out the window much later - checking to see if Arbee was in the mood to come back in - I heard Neelix's plaintive yowl. It was the same sad caterwaul that had clued me in on what direction he had wandered this afternoon after he jumped over the fence.

So I opened the door of the mesh cage and reached in to get him and he smelled of feces. What happened? I couldn't tell until I got inside that it was all smeared on his back. After I washed him off, I went out to the cage to clean it, but I couldn't find any on the cage, so how he got it on his back, I don't know.

All this day, we've been cleaning places in the house where he sprayed urine, and now Kira likes to wee on throw rugs or in the shower stall more than in the litter box, so that's more urine in the house. My whole life these days seems to revolve around cat urine and cat feces.

Kira got an unexpected bath today. She fell into the pool. Somehow she kept her upper body dry and managed to pull herself out, but it was an unpleasant surprise for her. Once she got herself dried off and fluffy again, she took a hard nap on my lap, something she doesn't usually do. It was quite entertaining for the other cats to see her furiously paddling to get out of the deep end. Her son, Sulu, even jumped back over the fence from the neighbor's yard to watch.

Third Rejection

2006-08-15T16:05:00.000-04:00

My brother's agent, or one of them anyway, rejected my book after reading the entire manuscript, or an assistant read it while she was on vacation. She said cat books aren't what her clients know her for anyway. This would have been a shortcut, but on the positive side, this takes me out from under having to be grateful to my brother if the book sold. Now I have to prove I can do it on my own.

I just wonder how you do it. Many trips to the post office, I gather.

Kira has a tapeworm, I think. My husband said he saw white moving things in her stool. I can't afford a vet trip, found a "prescription strength" pill that cost $23 for three of them, so it better be good. Kira seems to already feel better and plays like a kitten sometimes.

Kira

2006-08-07T20:41:00.000-04:00

When I saw the mother of Seven and Sula, I had to take her home and get her some food. She was so small and frail looking.

Marley & Me: How About Me?

2006-07-28T22:49:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading "Marley & Me" which has been on the bestseller list for so many weeks, I couldn't put it on hold at the library so I had to buy it at Target. I didn't think it was the most fantastic dog story, in fact, it was kind of a typical dog story, and the guy writes like many newspaper columnists do, padding things out to get his word allotment in, but still, I cried like everyone else when the fetus died, the dog died, etc. And yes, living with pets make us all better people. (Except for all the bad people who don't get their pets fixed!)

I've got laughs and cries in my book, too. I need to find an agent! I went on the Internet to see how much money this guy made, and it's quite a bit. Even 10 percent of what he's making would solve all my current problems. And I even have a new chapter, because I just got Cat No. 8, which I will write about soon. This photo is of Cat No. 8's son, Sulu, who is actually Cat. No. 6.

I am so pathetic.

The Book is Done

2006-07-05T21:39:00.000-04:00

I finished the book. It printed out at about 92 pages, not including the proposal. One of my brother's agents agreed to look at it, although reluctantly, so I mailed it off to E. 11th Street in New York City. The rules say I now have to give her assistant six weeks to think about it.

Neelix (above) goes two or three days on his tranquilizer and then roars back. I think he figured out how to sleep it off and cut down the time. On the recent roar-back, he broke a coffee cup and a thick plastic cup and cleared the breakfast bar a couple of times. Then he went downstairs and peed on the back of the laundry room door.

Levels of Cat Heirarchy

2006-04-26T17:24:00.000-04:00

Lately I've been trying to find good deals on climbing trees on eBay because I read the best way to keep the peace in multiple cat households is to afford them a way to rank themselves geographically.

Seven

2006-04-26T17:23:00.000-04:00

Chatterbox

2006-04-26T17:20:00.000-04:00

One Valuable Piece of Information

2006-04-03T16:58:00.000-04:00

I've been reading dozens of cat care books, trying to find help for Neelix. I flip through the index, find nothing useful, and resell the book on amazon.com. But in "The Veterinarian's Guide to Natural Remedies for Cats," I found one useful thing, coat Neelix's tranquilizer pill in butter. The last one went down easier, so hopefully this will consistently work.

Lessons Learned About Vets

2006-03-11T23:30:00.000-05:00

Always tell the vet the cats do not go outside. Otherwise, they are going to load you up with unnecessary feline leukemia tests and shots.

Don't tell the vet how many other cats you have. They freak out. Or they start blaming things on mutliple cat households when you know the problem was going on back when you didn't have so many cats.

Don't be afraid to decline tests. It's a cat.

Neelix still has goo coming out of his eyes, in spite of my spending more than $200 at the last vet and giving him the second bottle of antibiotics this month and trying to get that ointment in his eyes. I feel sorry for him, especially since he was fine up until I took him to Vet #2 and they did so much testing on him. I think he caught the cold from the lizard cage at that place, or the other cats in the room.

Vets Who Run Unnecessary Tests!

2006-03-07T20:29:00.000-05:00

Neelix had a cold, not uncommon for him except this time was a little more than a stuffed up, crusty nose. His eyes were leaking greenish goo in the corners. It was hard to tell he was sick at first because the tranquilizers he's taking for spraying make him so listless, I didn't pick up on the fact he was sick, too.

I was annoyed at the last two vets I took him to because the first one declined to prescribe for him unless I left him there all day for sedation and blood testing. The next one was able to get a blood and urine sample without sedating him or boarding him for the day, but that only resulted in a $350 bill saying there is nothing much wrong with him.

So I took him back to a vet he went to once last year for tranquilizers. They had not charged me much at all, had not run any tests, just gave me the Buspirone. They got me back this time, strongly advising that something was amiss with him and they needed to run many tests, including leukemia. Well, the last two vets I had gone to said if he didn't have it by now, he probably never would and I didn't even need to keep up with the boosters anymore. I signed an agreement to $250 worth of tests, and regretted it immediately. Even the "Cat Fancy" magazine I read in the waiting room said feline leukemia testing was unnecessary and often produced false positive results.

They sent us home with an antibiotic and an eye ointment, which is next to impossible to actually get on his eyeball.

Tonight, the partner vet, who didn't see Neelix, called with the results of his blood test and made them sound like something crazy, telling me red blood cells this and that, and homoglobulin levels, and in short, nothing too serious, but still....when I finish the antibiotics, let her test him AGAIN, plus do a stool sample and a heartworm test!

A heartworm test? Why? What makes you think he has heartworms, I asked. He gets these colds all the time. He's been getting them since he was an abandoned three-week-old kitten. His first two vets didn't know why I was bothering to keep him alive because he'll be sickly all his life. The vet on the phone said, oh. Okay, well, call if you need anything.

They don't even ask about the cat's history and want to run more tests. I went on the Internet and looked up the symptoms for heartworms in cats and there are no symptoms, and not even a cure! So what's the point of knowing if the cat has them or not? I am not going back to this place, although I can't send them hate mail because they're open until 8 p.m., and sometimes when you come home and find a sick cat, it's the only place. The emergency vet is downtown and probably charges just as much, but they don't run a whole bunch of unnecessary tests, at least. They just treat the emergency.

Second Not Yet a Rejection

2006-03-05T11:07:00.000-05:00

The literary agent in New Jersey, Barbara Bauer Literary Agency, Inc., uses my self-addressed stamped envelope to send me form invitations to various writers forums she conducts in New York City, and a brochure that explains to submit a manuscript, I have to send her the entire, finished manuscript. Did I miss this on her Web site? Or could she have mentioned this in the email she sent me referring me to the Web site, which said you had to query by mail with the SSARE? I wonder who her most successful client is.

Her name is very similar to the last local vet I went to and paid $356 to essentially tell me nothing was wrong with either one of my cats, Neelix or Merly. My brother-in-law later tells my husband that his vet diagnosed his dog with cancer and the operation to remove the tumor revealed it was a cyst caused by an ingrown hair. He says they overbill to pay for the upkeep of the exotic animals in their waiting room and for the free community service they perform, like rescuing Katrina pets.

Sulu's hair around his anus and on his tail is so long and luxurious, he's developing hygiene issues. Stinky Butt had to be dipped in the sink and get his hind end shampooed yesterday. He was a good sport about it. Today I am keeping the most restless ones, Sulu and Neelix, relatively quiet by opening the windows even though it's a tad cool. The sound of birds and the smells of outside are mesmerizing to them.

Bed Time Chaos

2006-03-05T11:02:00.000-05:00

How many cats do you see?

Quote

2006-03-03T23:43:00.000-05:00

"To live with a cat is a lesson in sharing power," says author Jo Coudert. I say, to live with seven cats is a lesson in anarchy.

First Rejection

2006-02-28T14:34:00.000-05:00

The first literary agent I queried, the Nelson Agency out of Denver whose biggest book is a chick lit novella, "Bachelorette No. 1," sent me a form email rejection. That took three weeks. I have two more out, one to a guy in upstate New York who has "cats" in his company name, and the other is a woman in New Jersey who emailed me back that I had to submit the query in writing with a self-addressed stamped envelope, how quaint. And how odd to tell me all that in an email response to my email.

I liked the Nelson Agency Web site, and she has two projects that might go to TV movies, so it's sad she didn't see the chick lit potential in my sick chick cat book.

Neelix is getting a little restless and agitated again. I have to rewash my black sweater for the second time and the orange top that was hanging in the closet next to it because he peed on them. But, to be fair, I'm only giving him one tranquilizer every few days instead of two a day.

A Shift in the Cat Distribution

2006-02-23T14:32:00.000-05:00

Ever since we got back from the vet, with a newly subdued Neelix, the whole cat situation at the house has changed. There used to be as many as four cats in the bed every night. Now there's none. Arbee is sleeping in the recliner in the living room at night and stays there in the morning. Neelix is drugged out on the sofa all evening, and in the morning he curls up in a basket in the sunroom. Where he is the rest of the day, I don't know. That Arbee has come out out of the bedroom at all indicates he is not bothering her as much. The kittens are settling down a little.

I'm really enjoying Jo Coudert's "Seven Cats and the Art of Living" and recommend it as not just a cat book, but a people therapy book, too.

Trust and Distrust

2006-02-17T13:08:00.000-05:00

Both the kittens went through their neuterings fine. Sulu was found to also have an yeast infection in his ears. He's supposed to be getting twice daily drops, but I think my husband and I are forgetting to do this. The kittens returned home and immediately resumed jumping and playing, which makes me wonder if they had surgery at all. Seven lifted his tail the other day, giving me a rare glimpse of his balls, and I didn't even see where he had been shaved, and his balls still seemed perky and all there. Did they actually do anything? They had no resentment toward me for taking them on the long, long drive to the vet who did reduced price neuterings, even though they meowed plaintively there and back. This morning, as I sat at the kitchen counter reading the paper, Seven stretched out on the neighboring barstool and extended a paw to me, making affectionate, undemanding contact.

Neelix, on the otherhand, is still wary and distrustful and eyes me suspiciously and runs when I approach him. His urine tests were all negative, despite the red and white blood cells, but we made him finish his bottle of antibiotics anyway. Figuring out how to give him his tranquilizer is still a problem. He won't eat his food if it's in it, which means another cat could come along and get tranquil. I tried mixing it with mayonnaise one morning and smeared it on his face, but first I had to chase him all over the house. My nose detects evidence he's been spraying somewhere in the house since he came back from the vet. He definitely hit two of my sweaters on the bottom rack of the closet. I guess that was for giving him his medicine.

Still a Zombie

2006-02-12T21:10:00.000-05:00

Neelix's personality is still gone. In fact, he's almost the opposite of everything he was before. He doesn't come out when company's over. He's timid and fearful. It's been four days since his visit to the vet and I've only given him one and half capsules of the tranquilizer. He hasn't taken any of it in three days. At this rate, one pill a week ought to hold him, maybe one pill a month! But he is so changed, it's almost as if the old Neelix died. Neelix is gone and what's left is a different, sad cat.

Tomorrow Sulu goes to the vet to be neutered. No food for anyone after midnight. No breakfast for Sulu.

Where I Am Now, Seven

2006-02-11T13:02:00.000-05:00

I've just started writing a book about my life with cats, how I went from never being able to have one because of my mother, to having two for a long time, to where I am now, seven, and how I fear that in 20 years, when I am old and alone, I'll be one of those crazy women who have 600 cats and have to be arrested.

I've got a book outline, several chapters completed, and I sent a proposal to one literary agent in Denver. A friend tells me I need to approach many more, not wait to hear back until I move on to the next one. My goal is to sell this book and make enough money to pay for the upkeep of these cats. Vet bills for the past two months have been more than $700, and next week I have to get the two male kittens fixed.

I won't be writing the book here, but while I'm writing about past cats and past histories, I'm going to post notes about present cats on this blog.

Neelix had red and white blood cells in his urine, whatever that means. I know when I have cells in mine, I have to go on antibiotics. He is, too, now, plus he's taking Cosequinn to strengthen his bladder walls and Clomipramine for his manic activity and spraying. I read about Clomipramine on the Internet and the vet agreed to let us try it. Giving Neelix this much medicine is not easy. I can get the liquid antibiotic in him twice a day, but the Cosequinn capsules are being either mixed with the antibiotic or sprinkled on his food, and right now he's not eating. Either he still feels bad from having his blood and urine taken at the vet's through a syringe three days ago, or the one dose of Clomipramine I managed to get in him has completely wiped out his personality. All he does is sleep in a sitting position, or sit in one spot and stare straight ahead.

It's like a whole different cat because before he was the one always yowling to get out, spraying on everything, screaming for food a dozen times a day, chasing the female cats, and knocking everything off the kitchen counters. Now that he's a zombie, the females realize immediately the atmosphere in the house has changed and I'm seeing them in rooms they usually don't enter.