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.