Arbee 1998-2015

At some point her life, Arbee got quite obese, so when she began losing weight, her appearance just became more normal cat size to me, and we figured cats start thinning out as they get older. So we missed the signs of trouble ahead. She knew what time the heat cranked up in the morning and would get on the grate. I thought that was another sign of just aging, so I set up a heating pad on her corner of the sofa and kept it turned on.

Then in early February 2015, I found a big scratch on the side of her neck. She must have been digging at herself hard. I didn't think maybe something in that area was irritating her. My husband said she stopped showing up for breakfast, and ate very little at dinner time. Again, we wrote it off to her age. After all, she was approaching 80 years old in human years. I wasn't eating like I used to either. By the middle of February, she wasn't eating at all that we could tell, and hiding behind the bathroom door.

Finally, I accepted she was dying. Old age was coming to collect. She was moving slow and wobbly, and would clamp her mouth down and turn her head if I offered food, even her favorites. But what was worse, suddenly I could pick her up easily. She had no fight left in her to resist. 

My younger cat, Kira, had similar symptoms back in November, sleeping on the heat vents, walking wobbly, not eating. The vet even decided she probably had a brain tumor, and when I declined a $1,000 MRI, they sent me home with Prednisone tablets. Kira was herself again in a month. I knew Arbee hated the car and the vet, but I had to try.

Another bad sign. She was mostly quiet all the way to the vet, even though we had to wait two hours because we didn't have an appointment. After pleading with the desk staff, they squeezed us in, but I got the meanest, least compassionate of the vets at my favorite practice, and she was obviously irritated that I had waited so long to bring Arbee in. The last time they had seen her, four years ago when she was obese, she was 10 pounds. Now she weighed in at 5.1.

"She's lost half her body weight," the vet said in an accusing tone. (Maybe she was just exasperated at neglectful pet owners, but I felt accused.) "There's no point running a lot of tests. It's probably her kidneys failing. You should put her down now. Don't let her suffer." I snapped back like I had been slapped. Right now? Put her down? Okay, she was barely moving on the examination table. Her temperature was below normal, her heart beat was slow, but...but...you brought Kira back from the brink. 

"We can hydrate her, maybe give her an antibiotic, but it'll probably just kill her on the spot!" the vet said. Again, I felt slapped. My mind was racing, trying to figure out what to do. I was almost ready to vote to try all that, even though it might kill her, because then it would be out of my hands. But before I could make up my mind, the wheels were in motion. The assistant came in with a warmed up bag of fluids, but she kept the needle in Arbee's neck for such a brief time, barely a minute or two, I knew they were just faking it. When they hydrated Kira, it took more than five minutes to get a bag of fluids in her, and they had to keep squeezing the bag to keep it moving. I could tell the bag was still full when the assistant took it off.

The vet came back with two shots, an antibiotic and a steroid, and quickly gave them to her and left. The bill was $99. She was so sure it was kidney failure, she never looked in Arbee's mouth, and for that I will never forgive her. But to be fair, I didn't mention that Arbee seemed to be swallowing her saliva more often and occasionally there was a fleck of brownish fluid on her chin. I think the truth was I didn't notice that until the next day, Tuesday, when I went on death watch and sat with her around the clock.

Mostly she slept or stared into space. Sometimes she lifted her head. Her ears would rotate a little when there was a new sound. She didn't die Monday, and didn't improve any despite the fluids -- or lack thereof -- or the shots. Tuesday I started looking up mobile vets, and my web browser sent one of them a blank email from me, even though I didn't recall pushing any Send buttons. They emailed me back if I needed their services. I said no, I thought my cat was within two hours of dying naturally.

But she wasn't. She lasted all through Tuesday, and it was the longest day of my entire life. I would look at the clock and not believe it. How could it only be an hour later? Once she got up and wobbled to the back door when I let the other cats out. It was so cold, I couldn't let her go, but I bundled her up in a blanket and we walked around the yard. I got down on what was left of the grass in February and let her smell it, but she didn't want to eat any of it. When my back was turned, she got off the sofa and moved to the floor. She would make her way to the nearest water bowl, drink a lot, and then just collapse out of exhaustion. Another time, she tried to jump back up on the sofa and got her claws stuck and just hung there. I don't know how long it was before I noticed, but it made me nearly hysterical. She couldn't be left alone for a minute. 

Someone on my Facebook page I didn't know well posted, "How long are you going to let that cat suffer?" It was like a knife in my heart and I immediately unfriended him, but he was right. 

Tuesday night, I set up the futon of death where I had slept with Merly the last three nights of her life, letting her suffer as well. We had the electric blanket, the space heater, puppy pads under her hindquarters and head for any leakage. She hadn't moved from a sideways position since 11 p.m., and never would again. I had a little lantern at the head of the futon, barely working, but just enough light that I could watch for death to cross her face. It was then I noticed the swallowing motions she made every five minutes or so, and the brownish liquid at the corner of her mouth. I noticed a fleck of blood on her paw, and a reddish stain on the puppy pad. She must be bleeding inside her mouth.

My mind raced all night, trying to figure out what to do. Go back to the vet and insist they look in her mouth? That it's just a cut, and they can fix that and she'll be able to eat again and all will be well! But that would mean another two hours in the waiting room. Where could I get an appointment and get in right away? Had she been without solid food for so long now, it was too late to bring her back? The damage was done? 

At 4 a.m., I heard my husband upstairs getting ready for work, so I bundled Arbee up and moved to my bed. The futon was too uncomfortable and I still thought she was close to death and we would nap it out. She was so still, I thought she was gone for sure, or minutes away. My husband came in to say goodbye and she flicked her tail. It broke my heart and devastated him. He left for work so quickly, I didn't realize he was gone.

I couldn't sleep, and Arbee couldn't die. The hours ticked by and she was still breathing. Now I was making her suffer. Years passed, and it was only 8:30 a.m., and the vets were beginning to open, so I started calling. I was too ashamed -- and still mad -- to go to my favorite vet, so I called a new one that had just opened. Maybe they didn't have much business yet and could take me immediately so we didn't have to wait in a room full of barking dogs for two hours. But the one vet on duty was going into surgery and they could not accommodate a new patient, even for an urgent euthanasia. "Have a great day," the receptionist said, ending the call.

Really?

As soon as the sun came up, I had moved Arbee into her favorite spot in the sunroom, with the heating pads and the puppy pads, another blanket tucked up to her chin. She tilted her head upward just a little toward the morning light. I had brushed my teeth, changed my clothes, warmed up blankets in the dryer to line a box so we could go to the emergency vet, but I was doing it all in slow motion. I hated the emergency vet. They were expensive, and the first thing they did was separate you from your pet. You sat in a cushy little private room while your pet was in the cold, clinical, stainless steel exam room where you could not go, and you would wait for hours. I was terrified they would take Arbee from me and run all kinds of expensive, horrible tests on her before agreeing that she needed to be euthanized. But it was starting to look like my only option.

Suddenly my husband appeared in the room as if he had beamed in from the Enterprise. I hadn't heard him come in. He was just there. He said he came home to get something for work, but took one look at Arbee and said call someone! Get that mobile vet over here now! I had called at 7 a.m., but got the answering machine and I didn't leave a message. This time they answered. I told them my cat was dying and needed help. They said their morning was booked, maybe this afternoon? I mentioned I was the one who sent the blank email yesterday. She remembered. She asked where I lived. I told her, and they said -- much to my surprise -- they'd be there in an hour. 

The decision was made. 

My husband left to go back to work, and I ran around the house, vacuuming, making the bed, getting ready for company as quickly as I could. The phone rang. My husband had called his boss and told him he wasn't coming back to work and was coming back home. He said he'd be there before the mobile vet arrived.

But they beat him to my house by 10 minutes. I don't know how or why they got there so fast. Two young women came in. I signed a paper quickly and handed over my credit card while the vet looked at Arbee, who still had not moved. She sized the situation up immediately. There was a lesion in her mouth. She said the name of it, but my mind blanked it out. Probably something like a gingival squamous cell carcinoma. I did hear her say it was not uncommon in old cats, and there was nothing you could do for it. Nothing. This was the right and only thing. My husband had magically appeared in the room again and sat next to Arbee. 

"First we're going to sedate her, and we'll step out of the room and you can say your goodbyes, take as long as you want," she said. No, no, I could hear myself say. She's suffering. Do it now. Now that I knew what had been happening, that she had been swallowing blood for the last few days, that she was starving and couldn't eat for the last five, and was too weak to care that four people and four other cats were all in the same room staring at her -- just 10 days before when one person she didn't know came into the sunroom, she had run out -- I wanted it to end as soon as possible. I had done this horrible thing to her by not euthanizing her Monday morning when I had the chance. I had caused her all this horrible pain, this horrible death.

My husband kept his hands on her, but I had stepped back in revulsion at myself for what I had done and didn't see the sedation shot. I thought the big needle the vet inserted into her side and slowly injected was the sedation shot and the death fluid would come next in an IV bag, but that was the shot. When she pulled it away, she said, "That was quick, she's gone already. But I'll stay awhile to make sure." Arbee gasped and a blob of blood popped out of her mouth. I cried she was still alive, but the vet and my husband both said it was just a reflex action. Arbee was gone. They took a paw print in a wad of clay, gave me a receipt, and packed up their things. I was grateful beyond measure for their quick and kind service, and for finally telling me what was wrong with Arbee and pretending like there would have been nothing I could have done to prevent it.

(And reading up about oral cancers in cats, I can only conclude trying to treat it would have been more horrifying and painful for her then how she died.)

So for the sixth time since 1996, I lined a box with towels and kept an eye on her as she hardened into a rock, and kept asking my husband, are we sure she's dead? I don't want to bury her alive. And he would say he was sure. (When my first cat died in 1996, I took the corpse to the vet before I could bury her.) We collected our tools and gloves and headed out to his mother's house in the country and put Arbee in the ground next to Merly and Red. I looked forward to going to work the next day, to step into my other life where there are no cats, but it snowed that night and work was canceled. I had held it together all day on Wednesday. I had accepted the blame and choked it back, but alone in the house, it finally exploded into a hour of sobbing and gasping I could not stop. 

I could not stop until I looked over at Neelix, who was on his 16th month of survival with a cancerous tumor on the side of his nose; Neelix, my now oldest cat; Neelix, the next cat I was going to make suffer because I would not know when the right moment was that quality of life ends and true suffering begins. I wait until my own true suffering begins, which is not fair, not right. 

The Feral Cat

Revised from my book on Amazon Kindle, Confessions of a Crazy Cat Lady, chapters 10-11

Arbee, 1999

After my cat Yoda died, my boyfriend Bobby and I settled in for our second year together in a cramped apartment. The household divided into camps, me and them. His cats, Red and Merly, responded only to him and they had their own secret language. If we broke up, they’d go with him and I’d be alone.

I suspected he was thinking of leaving, having found evidence he might be seeing someone else or at least thinking about it, so my subliminal need for my own cat became more intense. I had recently interviewed for a couple of jobs that would have dramatically and positively changed my life, and didn’t get either one, so that was pushing me, too. I needed to do something. I needed something of my own.

All that negative energy came to a resolution on a bright, cold Martin Luther King Day in 1999. We were sitting at an Arby’s in the middle of the afternoon when Bobby spotted a little white cat out in the parking lot brushing up against our car for the engine heat. Without any encouragement from me, he ran out to get it. I took care of the trays, got his coat and went to see how it was going. The cat was in the cactus landscaping by the door. We tried to smoke her out by coming at her from two directions, but she darted into the parking lot and took refuge under a car.

A small audience gathered to watch the chase and told us the cat had been at the restaurant for weeks, including during a recent devastating Christmas Eve ice storm that had shut down the city, and no one had been able to catch it. A cat who might be the mother was run over on the highway in front of the restaurant. And one woman volunteered that the cat was a rare short-legged breed called a Munchkin.

We gave up trying to catch her, but not before I made eye contact with the little white kitten with black markings on her head that looked like a hat. “You are my destiny,” the cat seemed to say to me. “If you can catch me.”

I stopped at the Arby’s every day after work to see her. I’d buy her a roast beef sandwich and try to
 grab her, but she continued to elude me. One day I waded into the cactus landscaping, trying to catch her, and got covered in cactus needles. My legs looked like a porcupine and I ouched all the way home. Bobby had to pull them out with tweezers.

More determined than ever, I called the local Animal Adoption Rescue Foundation, as well as a friend named Julie Farnsworth who had a successful record of collecting stray dogs off highways. 

Julie headed out with her squirrel trap and spotted the cat immediately, panhandling customers for roast beef. No one could touch her, but she let everyone know she was there and ready to accept their leftovers. She entered Julie’s baited trap three times, but each time she was able to grab the food and get out without triggering the door. The kitchen staff at Arby’s told Julie they had successfully caught her earlier that day but she got away during the transfer to another cage.

Kate, the local animal rescue league lady, came out the next night and set up her trap and caught a cat, but it was a different one, possibly a litter mate since this cat also had black and white coloring. Kate’s plan was to have the one she captured fixed and then released back in the same place and advised me to do the same should either one of us catch my cat. It was the best way to handle feral cats, she said. They never make good pets because you can’t handle them and if they get outside, they try to make a run for it back to the colony and get killed on the highway.

It turned out the cat she trapped and named Rebecca could be handled, though, and Kate kept her. Encouraged that there might be other kittens that could still be domesticated, she kept returning to the Arby’s with her cages. There was a thriving colony of  probably a hundred cats traveling in the storm drains behind the fast food restaurants. In the weeks immediately after my cat was captured and we stopped calling each other, she trapped four adult cats, neutered and returned them and was working on the other 96.

Arbee outside her first home 

My cat had decided her best chance was not with the colony but in the cactus garden outside the Arby’s. We continued to dissuade her of that career plan. Julie went out again, this time with a raccoon cage and fishing line to trigger the door herself and caught her. The cat wasn’t a Munchkin. She just chronically spent her life in a crouch, ready to spring away.

The manager at Arby’s had given me a list of phone numbers of people who had volunteered to adopt this cat if it was captured, and I talked to a few of them. None of them had plans to get her fixed or even keep her indoors. All they were really offering was to transport her from Arby’s parking lot to their neighborhood or backyard. Kate had warned me that there was no point trying to find homes for ferals, even when there were offers. So many people just aren’t very good pet keepers. They don’t get them fixed. They let them roam, and when they move, or the cat becomes pregnant, sick, or just not cute anymore, they abandon them.

Extreme cat rescuers, I would discover, have very particular standards for cats and they don’t compromise. Like me, they end up with a house full of foster cats because it’s so emotionally difficult to let the rescued cat go to a home that isn’t, in their estimation, ideal. And ferals are not the ideal pet, but I was sticking to the pact we made, eye to eye, in the cactus garden.

On the Internet, I learned one unfixed female can produce two or more litters per year. Even with their shorter lifespan, one feral cat can be responsible for 420,000 descendents. That’s a lot of cats. The Feral Cat Coalition supports trapping, neutering, and releasing ferals as the best method of stabilizing a colony, but it requires the dedicated services of volunteer trappers, vets and colony feeders.

One of these groups kept a record of their colony project over three years. They started with 44 cats and in the month it took to capture and neuter all of them, three were found dead. One cat had to be euthanized because of its health, so 40 neutered cats were released back into the colony, 24 males and 16 females. The females that were fixed were already pregnant with 32 kittens.

Three years later, 30 of them were still alive, joined by six new cats, so even with neutering, the colony was only reduced by four in three years, including the additions. But without neutering, the 16 females could have easily produced 100 kittens a year, or 300 more cats during the three years of the study. And those 300 would have been producing hundreds more.

 I named my fast-food cat Arbee and Julie and I estimated she was four to six months old. She was quiet on the drive home. Red and Merly screeched loudly and ran for cover when I carried the cage through the door, even though Arbee had not said a word to announce her arrival. They must have sensed a feral cat before I even got the key in the door. They never did that again with any of the other additions to the cat family, so that was strange.

For the next few days, Arbee crouched quietly in the cage. Red and Merly wisely decided to ignore her. I continued to stop at Arby’s every day after work and bought her a roast beef sandwich. She adjusted to using a litter box in the cage immediately, so on the second day I needed to change the sand. I brought the cage into the bathroom, closed the door, and opened the cage. Arbee had been so calm all this time, I thought it would be fine.

All hell broke loose.

Arbee leaped up on the shelves above the toilet and knocked everything off them, jumped into the sink and knocked everything off it, and nearly ripped the shower curtain off the rod. I grabbed her and held her like a baby over my shoulder, patting her back, and she was calm and still again and happy to get back into the cage. It was one of the very rare times I held her.

With all this going on, my relationship with Bobby seemed to get back on track as we both focused on figuring out how to live with Arbee. I was solving other problems in my life by getting another cat, not a good solution, but there it was.

Arbee, Part II

The next time I had to clean Arbee’s cage, I decided not to limit her to destroying the bathroom. I would do it in the more familiar living room. I opened the door and backed off. She came out and positioned herself in the room, and that was the end of her cage days. Red and Merly didn’t attack her. Merly even offered to play Turbo Scratcher with her, a game where they hit a ball on a circular track repeatedly. She took an interest in all the toys, but we still couldn’t touch her. She found a hiding place when she wanted to sleep, and the rest of the time she kept all humans at a wary distance.

One evening she was sitting in the middle of the living room doing a little humping dance and making mewing noises and Bobby said, “Uh oh, she’s in heat.”

You I can tolerate.

Getting her in a carrying case to go to the vet and get fixed was going to be a dilemma since I couldn't touch her, but Arbee decided to postpone that trip by disappearing. The next morning we couldn’t find her anywhere in the house. Then I noticed I had left a window open. We lived on the second floor and even Red, who loved to be outside, never jumped out the window. Did Arbee? She must have.

With sad hearts, we accepted that Kate had been right. You can’t domesticate a feral cat and Arbee was on her way back to the colony, even though it was on the other side of the river.

A week later, when Bobby was parking his truck, he saw her shoot across the street and disappear down the alley next to our apartment building. He followed and discovered an open grate that led into the crawl space under the building. She had been living under the building all week. We put food out.

The next evening when he came home, she was waiting by the front of the building for the evening’s hand-out. He ran upstairs, got a can of food, opened it in the foyer of our apartment building and hid behind the door. Anything to do with Arbee requires a great deal of patience because she is a very contemplative cat. She thinks about her options a long time. She takes a step forward, and then rethinks her options. Eventually she entered the foyer, went to the food and he closed the door behind her, expecting her to freak out. Instead, she intently kept eating. Bobby ran upstairs to tell me he had her in the stairwell and went looking for the cage.

Excited to see her again, I opened the door to peek down the stairs and there she was on the window sill in the hallway, looking right at me. I reached out, grabbed her and tossed her inside our apartment. She ran to our bedroom and got under the bed. We were happy to have her back.

The next day when Bobby went home for lunch, he called me at work. “Guess who’s sitting on my lap?”

She had voluntarily given him her trust. He could pet her, as long as he didn’t make any motions like he was going to pick her up. To the end of her life, 16 years later, she would get close to him only when she wanted. She particularly liked to help him remove his shoes by tugging on his shoelaces. She sat on my lap once, right after we moved to a rental house. I was so surprised, I didn’t move for two hours and had to watch Robert Downey Jr.  in “Chaplain” on TV even though I had seen it already.

Because she would now let Bobby get close, he was able to sneak up on her and get her in a carrier and to the vet to be fixed, which ended her butt bobbing and window jumping. Once back in the outside world, she had decided it wasn’t that great and she chose us instead.

We had another scare a year later when we moved to the rental house, which was surrounded by woods on three sides. The sun porch had louver windows and no screens. I cranked one pane open just a sliver, and she still managed to squeeze herself out and disappear. We searched and called to no avail and our only hope was that she would choose us again. We had only been in the house a few days and Bobby didn’t think she’d know how to get back to us.

But she did, showing up in the yard two days later. We cajoled and offered food and begged and prayed, and she took a few steps toward the door, stopped and thought about it for another 20 minutes, then took another step. After hours of drama, she finally chose us again.

That was the longest she’s ever been missing, but whenever she did escape into the yard, it always took hours to persuade her to come back inside. Sometimes I’d be up until 1 a.m., opening the door every 10 minutes, see her approach, get all the way to the steps, and then turn around and run back into the yard before she’d finally come in. The feral in her is always listening to and debating with the call of the wild.

The next time she was missing overnight, she had been with us for six years and disappeared from the house we had just purchased. Bobby feared she was lost for sure in this new neighborhood, but I was hopeful, even confidant, she would choose us again, and in the morning, I found her at the back door and she walked right in.

For the rest of her life, sometimes she would get out and it would be hours again trying to persuade her to come back in. Then she got to the point where she stayed in the backyard and would come in if no other cats were by the door, so we actually let her out when she wanted. She never took a liking to any of the 10 cats she lived with during her lifetime. In the last years, she was more tolerant and would eat near another one. The sunroom became her daytime hang-out and the living room sofa her evening spot. She had her rituals. She sat in the bathroom with my husband every morning as he got ready for the day, and she helped him take his shoes off at night when he got in bed. And that was her life.

She still liked an Arby's roast beef sandwich whenever we could bring her one. Raw catfish and people-quality tuna fish were also favorite treats. She hated riding in the car and was so frightened going to the vet, she would start gasping for air, so she seldom went. Her medical file is the thinnest. She only went to the vet 10 times in 16 years, including being fixed. She got her shots, and had an issue with licking herself bald in spots. She was so upset about going to the vet for that, I found an ointment online that worked.

Bridge Ahead

Hard to focus on anything, eating, sleeping, going to work, until Arbee crosses the bridge or I give her a push.

You're on Your Own - Cancer Cat Episode 12

Neelix weighed in today at 7.8 pounds and his tumor was slightly bigger than two months ago, so I felt like the Oncology Service was saying sayonara. They said there's no point continuing the Piroxicam or the Palladia, and all I can do is use something called Magic Mouthwash and Clindamycin antibiotics to clear up the sores in his mouth and hope his appetite improves and he gains weight so the cancer kills him before starvation does. The Magic Mouthwash smells bad and must taste horrible. He has foamed at the mouth, drooled it all out, and run around like a maniac every time I have dosed him. That was a $37.50 waste of money.

That is not much of a choice.

The mouth ulcers were caused by the medications, so I should have been happy to see the pills stop, but that means the tumor might grow faster. I negotiated dropping just the Piroxicam for now -- the one he sometimes threw up anyway -- but keeping the chemo Palladia -- the one we have to wear rubber gloves to administer.

My pill was still $366.74 because they did bloodwork again, and another $26 for the antibiotics.

I am nine hours short of completing my 120 hours of volunteer service for Fetch a Cure. I don't know with this prognosis if they will pay any more future bills.

Meanwhile, I have fallen victim to trolls on my Go Fund Me page twice now. Someone with crazy fake names donate $5, then after a couple of days, they cancel the donation, so a small amount of money keeps being deposited and withdrawn from my bank. You would think this organization would screen their donations more closely, and hold the funds back at least 10 days or something. There's no place on the website to complain.

We're All Good for Now

Neelix is doing okay, considering he's had a tumor on his nose since October 2013, and Kira seems to be her old self again, so my last post, that really sounded like doomsday, might have been premature.

Kira

I wasn't expecting Kira to be the next one to go on the critical list. After all, Arbee is the oldest, and Neelix has had cancer for a year. Even Chatterbox is older. But about three weeks ago, something completely sucked her personality out of her.

Three vets have no answers. Everything in her body checks out fine. So it must be a brain tumor. And she has all the symptoms of that, walking in circles, restlessness, bumping into things, just wanting to sleep and hide. She doesn't hear me go into the laundry room anymore. She doesn't ask to go out. She doesn't remember to eat unless you put the food under her face. She might use the litter box if you put her in it.

How could she have changed so much in just three weeks?

An MRI to detect a brain tumor is $1,000 or more. And there's really no affordable or humane treatment. When the last vet told me what she thought, I asked her what do people usually do? She said they reach a point where they can't stand the walking in circles part, sometimes it goes on all night, the pet never sleeps. And when you can't bear it any longer, you put her down.

She was such an affectionate cat, and had such a rough start in life, abandoned to live in the woods and kept having litters before she was even two. (We actually have two of her sons.) Finally, I just took her away from her so-called owner, catnapped her one afternoon. Between the parasites, fleas, July heat, and lack of food, she was about to die anyway. She was cross-eyed and losing her fur.

So I don't know. We'll see how much of this we can survive. Both of us will try.

(Jan. 2015 -- After two courses of Prednisone, she seems to be her old self again. She took her last pill of the prescription last week, so we'll see if the symptoms come back.)

The first week with us.

And she turned into this.

Neelix at the One Year Mark

The Two New Ones

BeeGee has been sleeping inside for nearly a year and a half now after a year of being just a neighborhood stray that came by for food. She summers in a cardboard box under my desk and winters in a walk-in closet. I can tell the seasons have changed because she moved into the closet recently. She still always thinks she wants to go out, but after an hour or two changes her mind and runs back to the door. I know she wants me to pick her up and bring her in when she turns her back to me and doesn't run away. She has not socialized with any of the other cats still. No confidence. Has yet to explore the rest of the house. Just knows how to get to this kitchen stool, the closet, the front door, or the box under my desk.

Mackie was the neighborhood stray who came for breakfast and dinner for nearly three years. Unless he's actually the cat we called Sylvester who was coming around since 2004, and then stopped. Is this Sylvester or a relative? Anyway, March 2014 I managed to grab him and cage him and get him fixed. After that success, I would try to grab him again on spring rainy nights and bring him in. He'd hide under the sofa. Then we got to the point where if I slept on the sofa, he would come up and sleep on it, too. Now he sleeps in our bed and doesn't care much for going out, and it's only been about seven months. He has not left our yard since he moved in. We think he used to live in the attic of a rundown garage across the street. He is a very affectionate cat. Lots of head butts and cuddling with his ear to my heart.

The Outlook Isn't Brilliant for the Catville Eight

Seven developed a hematoma in his ear, which required surgery, a drain, and actual buttons sewn into his ear. $288.00

Neelix has survived his cancer a year now, but his bimonthly checkups runs about $356.

Something has gone wrong with Kira. She's been lethargic for three days. But her temperature is normal, nothing seems to be amiss, but the vet I like the very least -- and the only one open until 7 p.m., wanted $422 to do bloodwork, test for leukemia, do some kind of cholesterol and vetscan, urinalysis, pancreatic lipase, cystocentesis, etc. It was late on a Thursday night. I just couldn't stand it. I need Kira to pull out of this on her own somehow. Or I need to talk to the vets I like first. We settled on a pencillin shot, dexamethasone, and a hydration for $156, which got done so quickly, I wonder how much fluid she actually got. She just wants to lay on the heat vent. She eats and drinks if you bring it to her, pees and poops if you put her in the box, but doesn't yell about going outside, doesn't prance around the house, doesn't do anything.

Meanwhile, Seven's cone, drain and buttons came off and he seems to have a permanently disfigured ear now despite all the buttons.

A Set Back - Cancer Cat Episode 11

Neelix weighed in at only 7.6 lbs today, which was shocking. That's almost two pounds less. The tumor has grown, so missing a week of meds in May and a week last week because of vomiting either made a bad difference, or the cancer is just progressing. So we are now doing four pills a week instead of six to give his stomach a break, and he goes in again in three weeks to have the tumor measured.

If it keeps growing, then we switch pills to something else. And if it keeps growing, it kills him. Or I have to make a decision. Meanwhile, he behaves like always.

The tumor is the mound under the right corner of the eye on the left.

Trial Run to the End - Cancer Cat Episode 10

I thought Neelix was getting ready to leave. July, after all, is only a couple of weeks away, and we have lost two cats in July. On a Tuesday night, he was dry heaving. Wednesday, he was listless and not interested in food. Thursday I was force feeding him water from an eye dropper, and he still didn't want food. Thursday night I called the oncologist, but it was 30 minutes from a three-day weekend for them and they said wait until morning and go to my regular vet.

I got an appointment for noon. He was furious at the blood test, the bag of fluids, and just being there, but everything came back normal and $310 later, it was determined the problem was gas on the stomach and a thickening of his intestines, which I didn't understand what that meant, but it was something that could be relieved with Metronidazole benzoate and some over the counter slivers of Pepcid AC. By the time we got home, he was ready to try a little food. Just the fluids alone must have perked him. The next day he was eating normally, but we haven't resumed his cancer treatment yet. I checked with the oncologist on Monday and they said 2-3 days after he resumes normal behavior.

My stomach hurts. 

Mackie Becomes a Whole Different Cat

Mackie continues to surprise us at how well he has adapted to being a now primarily indoor cat. In fact, he doesn't like to go out at all unless one of us is outside, and then he comes back in when we go in. If he gets left outside, he seems scared and uncertain, as if his indoor life was a just a dream and he's back in his reality.

But no, the reality is he's an indoor cat now that sleeps in our bed with us, and adjusted to the litter boxes easily. This after being an outdoor cat for two or three years, coming from where we don't know. Who raised him as a kitten? Because it seems unlikely he would have broken to the house this easily if he had not had some human contact as a kitten.

The thing that finally won him over completely was treats! He was so excited about the taste and crunch of them, he stopped hiding under the sunroom sofa and reconciled himself quickly to being on top of the sofa where treats were more likely to appear.

And unlike BeeGee, he's let the other cats approach him and get a sniff of him, so now most of them -- except Seven who still doesn't care for any of the cats who came after him except for the return of his mother -- have adjusted to him and they can all sit together on the sofa.

BeeGee is going to be much harder to win over, and if she is anything like Arbee, who after 15 years still doesn't let us pick her up, she may never adjust.

Sometimes I think the spirits of the cats who were here and have since gone -- Red, Merly, Callie -- entered Mackie because some of his new behaviors mimics them, especially Merly.

Mackie napping on top of a chair instead of under a sofa.

Neelix Update -- Month 7 - Cancer Cat Episode 9

Neelix is back from his May 2014 visit with the oncologist and nothing has changed except his weight. He is down to 9 pounds. He was 9.4 at his March visit, so he is losing two ounces a month. The tumor still has not impacted his vision, breathing or the roof of his mouth. His prescriptions were renewed. Today's fee was $326.44, with an additional $45 or so to renew his Piroxicam. They switched the compounding pharmacy from Wedgewood to DiamondBack, which seems to be in Arizona.

He is looking a little ratty-furred these days, which is how Red, Merly, Niki and Yoda got as they got old or very sick.

Update: June 8, 2014: He went through a long stage where the eye over the tumor kept running and a maroon colored crust would form. I learned to gently wash his whole head with a corner of a warm, damp washcloth, hoping it would feel like a mother's tongue to him. Right now that episode seems to have ended, his appetite is back and he seems bright and energetic again.

Neelix Reaches 12 - Cancer Cat Episode 8

We hit a milestone this week -- two in fact. Neelix reached 12 years old and is still the same cat except for that little tumor on his nose, which is still not growing, at least not growing out. If it's growing in, it hasn't interfered with his vision, breathing or ability to eat yet. Seven months since the diagnosis.

And we got our first GoFundMe donor, which opened the page up to the general public! And even the Lord made a contribution by making one of my grandmother's knick-knacks sell on eBay for several hundred dollars, which my sister very generously shared with my brother and me. And Fetch a Cure came through with another grant, which should cover his next two or three doctor appointments and blood work. So his medical bills may not quite drive me into bankruptcy yet.

Just Maintaining - Cancer Cat Episode 7

Neelix lost 4 ounces from Jan. 13 to Feb. 10, even though it seems to me he eats about as much as he always has. The doctor suggested the body is diverting some of the calories to fight the tumor. I was able to talk them into going to six weeks before the next blood test, although I started the negotiations by asking for two months, knowing I might be able to get a compromise of six weeks. The tumor has not grown.

They were out of Palladia, so he doesn't get his pill today.

Catch 22 - Cancer Cat Episode 6

Maybe I didn't read the fine print, or maybe they don't tell you this part until you register, but I need $100 worth of friends before I can meet strangers who might want to contribute to Neelix's cancer treatment.

I set up a page at a fundraising website called something like Go Fund Me, hoping maybe there was a community of cat ladies with spare money in the world who could all help me out with Neelix's bills. My page turned out fairly well.

Except I can't have my page posted to their website until my own network of friends, who I was instructed to send the link to via my Facebook and Twitter accounts -- and you are required to have a Facebook account to participate -- contribute the first $100. Only then do you get promoted to the larger network where people you don't know, all the worldwide community of cat ladies, might see your page.

So, strangers, here's the link.

Help me out!

January 2014 Check Up - Cancer Cat Episode 5

Neelix gained three ounces in two weeks.  His condition is stable. The tumor is not growing, but still there. He continues to take Palladia and Piroxicam, one alternating pill every day but Sunday. My husband has developed a method that usually gets him to swallow it the first time. With one, the blue pill, he has to wear chemo gloves. With the yellow pill, he does not.

I owe $1,315.25 to the Care Credit, the card I am charging my vet bills to.

According to one online chart I looked at, Neelix at 11 is equivalent to a 62-year-old human. At this point in a cat's life, every year is like approximately 10 human years, so when they tell me I am doing all this and paying all this to buy him maybe one year, it's kind of like 10 years, which is a lot. But not really.

Fetch-a-Cure was unable to do much more than cover the X-rays they required I get to submit a funding grant because I did not have a prognosis. The doctors cannot give me one because there's so little data on cat life expectation on these pills. Still, by accepting the small amount, I still have to volunteer 120 hours this year.

I have done five picking up holiday displays at vets and pet spas all over the north and west end of town. That was not difficult. I had taken the day off anyway because Chatterbox, the cat purchased to be Neelix's companion -- which did not work out -- had to have polyps removed from his ears that day.

The Story of Neelix

“Your son needs a therapist,” I told my husband, Bobby, when he came home.

“That’s what the vet said, he needs a therapist?”

“A behavioral therapist.”

It was no surprise. Just the previous week, Bobby had called me at work to tell me he could barely get into the house. “Your son knocked over the lamp and it blocked the front door like a barricade. I had to go in through the back door. And the stereo speakers were knocked off the shelf.”

Again, it was no surprise. He had also knocked a Pyrex tray of brownies off the kitchen counter, broke four sugar bowls, two glasses, a telephone, and a half dozen plates and saucers. If he can reach them – and somehow he does – he swings the photographs and bulletin boards on the wall until they come crashing down. Entire jars of spaghetti sauce have gone flying. I rush into the kitchen to find glass marinara.

I don’t know why he’s destroying our house when we have been the most superlative, doting parents to him. We took him in as an orphan when he was three weeks old and near death. We spared no expense to nurse him back to health. He sleeps in our bed, entwined in our hair.

He demands and receives three to four cans of whipped cream a week, and it cannot be a cheap brand. It must be the extra creamy with the blue top. What better life could a cat want?

We were living in a rented house surrounded by woods and I was employed in the job of my dreams, editor and jack-of-all-trades at a community newspaper. The work was a pleasure, the people in the office not so much. Many publishing jobs are not about producing a good, entertaining newspaper that equally inspires and enrages the citizens. Too many are about selling advertising and enriching the owners, and anything controversial in the paper that might lose a single advertiser becomes a crucible.

The first year, the managing editor who hired me was on my side. Then he left and I was fighting the good fight alone and suspected every issue would be my last. I survived one more year without him. As a comfort against the misery of knowing my days were numbered at the greatest job I ever had, I took home a cat who was hanging around outside the office. Lola was not the least bit attractive. Her coat had a little bit of every color in the cat hair universe, and the choice of colors around her face made her look dirty. But she had a great personality, friendlier than any of our three cats. She slept in our bed from the first night.

Before I realized how much I was going to like Lola, and how well she would fit in with our other cats, I wrote a story about her for the newspaper. Several people offered to adopt her. Then I got a call from a woman who claimed Lola was her son’s cat and actually named Harry, although it was a female. It seemed likely since they lived on the other side of the woods behind the newspaper office.

My heart sank when I returned Lola to them because it wasn’t a good environment for her. This woman and her small son were feeding a feral cat colony that lived in the woods. Lola, aka Harry, was the only tame cat in the colony and because the little boy could touch her, she was his favorite and mom wanted the favorite back. Lola had no chance of a good life in this environment, but I could hardly turn around and run off with her. The woman knew where I worked. I figured Lola would find her way back to the newspaper office and this time I would take her and tell no one. But she didn’t return until after I was fired. Employees I kept in touch with would send me emails about Lola-sightings from time to time. When I heard she was limping around and might have been injured, my heart broke, but I was still so humiliated at having been fired from the one job I was really good at, I couldn’t be seen hanging out there, waiting for Lola to show up. That was too pathetic.

All this set me up for Neelix, that and a charming little video of a fuzzy gray kitten falling asleep in a sitting position and then toppling over. Brenda, a co-worker at a former job, emailed it to me, with the note that she just happened to have a kitten that looked exactly like the one in the video and needed to find a home for it.

The kitten had the kind of desperate history that made it impossible for me to say no. Brenda’s son found a litter in the warehouse where he was working that summer. All the kittens were dead except for two. The mother was nowhere in sight. The boy brought both of them home, but Brenda already had two cats, so she carried them to the county shelter.

The next morning she had misgivings, so she called the shelter to retrieve them. One kitten had died during the night but the other was still alive, and barely. She picked him up and took him to the vet, got medicine for his worms and various ills and washed the fleas off him. When her husband put his foot down, she emailed me. (The next year she got rid of the husband.)

I met her in a shopping mall parking lot halfway between our houses. She handed me the tiny kitten, all his medicine, and wished me luck. He raced around in the cage all the way home, screaming to get out, until he had a small bowel accident, and then he settled down, confused about what had just happened.

We named him Neelix after a character in Star Trek: Voyager. There’s Neelix, a lizard-looking man, and then there’s another guy back on Earth who named his cat Neelix, and if you’re a Trekkie, you understand what I just said, and if not, then I’m sorry. I let my husband pick the name since naming privileges would make it easier for him to accept a fourth cat in the house. It worked.

I spent the next few weeks frantically calling vets to find the closest one opened at all hours of the day and night because Neelix was always on the verge of dying. His breathing was labored, his nose and eyes oozed green gunk. He slept either on my pillow next to my head or in a little bed full of Beanie Babies that were bigger than he was. Two different vets thought I was crazy trying to keep this kitten alive. There were plenty more kittens if I wanted one. And once the nasal cavity is damaged, it’s permanent. He would always be sickly, I was warned.

But we convinced ourselves that since Neelix has never felt fine, he doesn’t know he’s sick. If he could live this way, breathing noisily like Darth Vader, we could deal with it. Neelix had no idea how to eat and would stick his whole face in the food, and then open his mouth, so we were constantly wiping dried food out of his nose. The only food he would eat was the cheapest, a Wal-Mart brand called Special Kitty, so for the next few years, we were regular Wal-Mart customers, buying out their cat food inventory because Neelix had to eat every time he woke up and the food had to be fresh out of the package. If things weren’t perfect, he howled and knocked things over.

I had hoped one of the female cats would adopt him, but none of them would have anything to do with him, so whatever kittens learn from their mothers, Neelix didn’t learn. For a sickly kitten, he was a dynamo of destruction, as if he had to represent for his entire doomed litter.

Prior to being fixed, Neelix developed an intense relationship with a stuffed orange pig doll about the size of his head. He would carry Orange Pig around in his mouth, howling at the same time through clenched teeth. Then he would hump whatever pillow or blanket was available, holding on tightly to Orange Pig. We thought this would cease after his operation, but he and Pig still carried on, especially at bedtime. As soon as we shut down the house for the night, Neelix would find Pig and carry it up the stairs and join us in bed, humping the blankets in a manic little dance. Sometimes Bobby would get aggravated and wrest Pig out of Neelix’s mouth and toss it across the room.

We miraculously found a second, identical Orange Pig at Target, but Neelix made it disappear, probably by dropping it into a wastebasket. Pig was his sexual release and he took care of it. He’d leave it in his empty food bowl, or in his old Beanie Baby bed. Sometimes he’d put it in my purse or the bath tub. Pig is still with us, years later, always available for his next anxiety attack. At night, when we suddenly hear him making that strange yowling somewhere in the house, we’ll say simultaneously, “He’s got Pig.”

As for getting on the kitchen counters and knocking everything off, there was no cure. We kept water pistols and spray bottles at hand, but they only distracted him for the moment. Loud noises didn’t bother him. He was the only cat who didn’t run from the vacuum cleaner. In fact, he ran toward it. He followed it along as I vacuumed from room to room. I thought maybe he was deaf, but every time I brought up the possibility, Bobby would make a noise and Neelix would turn his head to look. I think he just feels the noise. You can sneak up behind him and grab him. He never hears you coming.

Sometimes when we are cleaning up yet another mess he made, we speak the unspeakable. Maybe we should find another home for Neelix, but how could we knowingly inflict him on anyone? It would be like giving a weapon of mass destruction as a gift. And the next unwary owners might not be so accommodating. I’ve heard of people putting cats down because they sprayed, which Neelix does.

But he is the only one of our rescued cats that lifts his front legs up when we come home and literally hugs us around the neck. Until the second crowd of cats came, he was the only one who slept in the bed with us, wrapped around our heads, purring like a motorized fur hat. You wouldn’t give away a bad child, and the cats were our children.

Neelix has no sense of direction. Whenever he managed to get out of the house, he’d take off for the woods, and then had no idea how to get back. When he was tired of exploring, he’d just sit wherever he was and look sad.

So an escaped Neelix was always a disaster we needed to attend to right away. Finding a small gray cat in an acre of dense underbrush and woods is no easy task, especially when he won’t answer you or come when he’s called. One day while I was searching the woods, I noticed the cars on the highway in front of our house had all come to a stop for no reason and were honking. I ran out to find Neelix sitting in the middle of the road, not moving, sad, lost, and oblivious to the line of cars waiting for him to get out of the way.

Another time, we searched for hours and found no sign of him. I put a transistor radio on a chair in the woods, hoping the music would draw him back toward the house. (Yes, I know. I do stuff like that even though I think he’s deaf.)

“Well, maybe it’s for the best if he’s gone for good, he’s so much trouble,” I sighed, which upset Bobby. He didn’t want me to see him cry, so he went back inside the house to take a break from searching.

I stayed outside and prayed that wherever Neelix was, my guardian angel would pick him up and drop him back into our yard because even though he was an ordeal, I didn’t think Bobby could stand to lose him. It would traumatize him and our relationship. Things would change between us, like a marriage goes sour when a child dies. One person is always harboring blame against the other.

I said my amens, and just then the motion detector light on the shed turned on. I turned around and there was Neelix, in the center of a pool of light, crouched down and looking sad, as if an angel had just picked him up and dropped him in our yard.

If you would like to donate to Neelix's cancer treatment, go here.

Hanging In - Cancer Cat Episode 4

Neelix gets a pill every day except Sunday. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday it is the Palladia, and we have to wear chemo gloves. It's a small pill and not much of a problem. Maybe the feel of the gloves opening his mouth is distracting.

Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, he gets Piroxicam. It is a capsule and not as easy to get down him. One dose turned into a mushy ball before we could get him to swallow it, it had been spit out so often.

He went back to the oncologist today. He weighed in at 9.6 pounds, problematic, because he was 9.94 just two weeks ago and 10.1 six weeks ago. He still seems to eat as much as he always did. He developed a craving for raw catfish, which our oldest female cat likes, so now I have to buy enough for two and he is rejecting his usual food waiting for catfish. The oncologist said the bump on his nose was actually a little smaller and has not broken through into his mouth or eyeball.

My husband thinks he is more "wound up" when he's awake. I think he sleeps more and sleeps sounder than before. I think both of us are exaggerating how he's always been.

2003 when he was one.

What To Do, What To Do - Cancer Cat Episode 3

I got an email today from the foundation saying "the medical advisory board denied your application because Neelix's prognosis could not be determined."

I wrote back to verify what that means, because we weren't told when he is going to die? As if something like that is knowable? Apparently so. They need to be told your pet has four months or less to live.

Then I was offered $306.60, which would be sent to the oncologist. That would cover almost one more two-week round of medications and testing. But the contract I have to sign to receive that also says I still have to volunteer 120 hours. That's 120 hours away from Neelix and values my time at barely $2.56 an hour, but it's volunteering after all. Still, it seems like the volunteer time should be prorated based on the amount of assistance you're awarded. 

I don't know what to do.

Yesterday Neelix started the Palladia, which he gets on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The Piroxicam is on order. We got the pill down him on the second try.

If you would like to donate, dear reader.