Current State of the Cats Address

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Chatterbox Came to Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neelix 2002-2017

Neelix had made it to his 15th year mark in mid-May of 2017, three and a half years living with nasal cancer, and had one of his better visits with the oncologist. Nothing was wrong; his weight was stable. The tumor was not growing. We were going to buff him up with some Prednisone along with his now just twice weekly chemo pill.

I immediately felt like: this is not good. From long experience, I know animals and people seem to level out at a good place right before they take the final plunge. I had not told the oncologist about the seizure he had six months before where his body just started twisting around. He had immediately recovered from it. Then there was another mild one a couple of months later. I did not tell her about the occasional nosebleeds. I did not want her suggesting we put him down, not as long as he kept eating and walking around. I always blamed the nosebleeds on their examination since they seemed to follow his bimonthly exams.

And so it was this time. It was a bad bleed, too. I’d wake up in the morning and find a trail of blood

spots across the floor, splatters on the wall. He was spending more time in his fortress of solitude, a fabric cube where he felt walled in. During the week of the nosebleed, he stopped eating and I thought, here we go. But the nosebleed subsided after three days and he resumed eating and Memorial Day weekend passed without incident.

My husband said Neelix came out for breakfast the morning of Tuesday, June 6, and when he got home from work, he appeared for dinner and went outside with the other cats. When I came home, he was sitting upright at the edge of the pool, staring into the water. When he heard me walking toward him, he walked toward me, in his usual stiff-legged way. He seemed tired, but he had seemed tired for a long time. In human years, he was in his 80’s. I picked him up, carried him inside and put him down on the floor.

Thinking back now, I wonder if I heard the distress cry earlier but didn’t know what it was or the TV

Gone, as if my heart could resuscitate him

was drowning it out. My husband walked in to ask what we planned to do about dinner, and there was another, louder, guttural noise. We looked at each. He ran to the back room and I followed, but he saw it first and was saying, “oh no” by the time I got there. Neelix was outside his cube, having another twisting seizure, but this time his forearm was in his mouth. I thought we just need to pull his paw out of his mouth, but my husband was pushing me back, “Don’t touch him,” and the other cats were trying to get to him to see what was going on, and he started yelling at the other cats, and I’m trying to reach out and grab Neelix, and it was utter confusion for just seconds.

“I have to hold him,” I cried out, and my husband backed off, but only because he said Neelix had stopped breathing. He reached down and pulled his paw out of his mouth. I refused to believe it. Neelix had bounced back from a seizure before. I grabbed a towel from the next room and scooped him up, but my husband was telling me he was gone. His eyes were open, but he was limp. I didn’t know what to do. This isn’t happening. He is going to come back. He always does. I sat at the end of the bed and rocked him, patted his face, pulled his paw. Come on. Come back.

Time passed. I rocked. My husband disappeared downstairs. When I finally gave up and went to join him, I had to turn away. His grief had swollen his face. No one felt like dinner anymore.

All evening I patted and arranged Neelix so he looked like he was sleeping, and the warmth subsided, and by morning he was a statue with fur. Only then I started to accept he wasn't coming back. I could clean his ears and wipe the crust off his nose without him fighting me.

We had lost our great pet cemetery in the woods behind my mother-in-law’s house when she sold

the house to downsize, and the terrain behind her current house was rough, trees and branches down and hard, unforgiving dirt. Pet cemeteries were too expensive. Cremation was another bill, and I didn’t trust anyone to give me the actual ashes of my actual pet. My husband said there was no place suitable to bury him in our small, gravel yard, so we went to my mother-in-law’s and found a tiny clearing behind the shed. It was an ugly and sad grave.

The unknown to me women who had helped pay for about a fifth of his medical bills through a GoFundMe came back for one last round after I posted his passing, and I was left with just a few hundred left to pay.

I haven’t done a picture book yet, which I did after each of the other cats died. Going through the photos, I was struck by the lack of any of him looking happy or peaceful. I found one and had it enlarged to 16x20, but in most of them, he looks annoyed or stressed or aggravated. In most of the photos, he’s asleep, because that’s when he seemed most relaxed. When he was younger, he would sleep stretched out, or twisted around. He probably felt good then and was carefree. I can only imagine he seldom felt that great the last few years. He was always on the lookout for me coming toward him with a dose of amoxicillin or the chemo pill, or Q-tips and alcohol swabs to clean his eyes and nose. He didn’t like any of it. But he kept eating, and walking, and sleeping, and getting up, and walking around the backyard.

So many worries and fears lifted when the worst happened. You live in fear every day that he’s going to die, and then he dies, and the fear is gone. It lifts off your shoulders and you are weightless with equal grief and relief. Every night for 15 years, he got in bed with us at night and I listened to him breathing, calculating how bad his current cold was, or if the cancer was advancing. I felt his wiry body and wondered why he never gained weight like the other cats. All his life, his stomach was flat and firm.

Now we don’t have to worry if we have enough raw chicken on hand, the only thing he would eat. We stopped buying six to 10 bottles of Reddi Wip with the blue cap, which he had to have several times a day. We stopped going to Arby’s to get him classic roast beef sandwiches, hold the bread, his special treat that always picked him up when his appetite was slack.

His head is as big as a lion’s in the giant portrait now framed on the wall, still watching me to see if I am coming at him with Q-tips and alcohol swabs. But in life he was a tiny cat, a sickly little kitten that needed so much nursing and then was always trying to take off on some adventure only to run out of steam and forget where he was going or why.

My husband tells people he was the bravest, strongest cat. I think he didn’t know how to be anything else.

Cat Naps

The Cattery

Neelix – acquired in 2002 as a sick kitten from a co-worker. Now 14, has been living with a nasal 

adenocarcinoma for nearly two and a half years, which has not increased in size. When I mentioned this yesterday to the original veterinary practice that diagnosed him, they were puzzled. “Usually those things grow fast.” He’s been on chemo pills all this time, which may have stopped it from growing and bought all this time, but may have also have made him thin and frail. On the other hand, he is 14, which is like being a 72-year-old man. (Named for the Star Trek Voyager character. Another character in that series named his cat Neelix after Neelix.)

Neelix

Chatterbox – acquired as a one-or-two year old cat from a Petco sometime between 2003-2004. I thought Neelix needed a friend and bought him for $90. He has been a good friend to all my cats except Neelix, who has always gone it alone. He went unadopted for nearly a year at Petco due to gastrointestinal problems (giardia) we quickly resolved, and because they thought he had bonded with two other cats there and the trio needed to be adopted together. Turned out Chatterbox just likes all cats a lot. We’re thinking he might be around 12-13 years old now. (Kept the name given to him by the rescue organization that handled the Petco sale.) Chatterbox had to have his tail amputated after it was cut worse by a vet's assistant while shaving it to clean a smaller cut, and the tail died and snapped off. We thought at the time that $600 was the worst thing.

Chatterbox

Kira – We know she was having kittens in 2005, so she herself may have been born sometime in 2003 or early 2004. She belonged to a girl renting a room next door to my sister-in-law and was just left behind to live in the woods and keep having kittens. In the summer of 2006, after already taking two of her kittens the year before, I saw her in a weakened conditioned in my sister-in-law’s backyard and just took her home. She has been the greatest cat ever, everything you’d want in a cat, equal parts independent, cuddly, and easy to manage. (Named after Deep Space Nine character Kira Nerys because she was so thin at the time we rescued her.)

Kira

Seven and Sulu – Kira’s sons. Born in spring 2004, so they’re both 12, and huge, Maine Coon looking cats. Sulu is extraordinarily mellow but adventuresome and will wander the farthest when he gets outside. Seven is nervous and apprehensive and had an expensive bout with a bladder infection a few years ago. (Named after Star Trek character Sulu because it rhymes with Zulu and his coloring was mostly white with some head-dressy darker head colors, and Seven named after the Star Trek Voyager character Seven of Nine because he was our seventh cat. And eventually we did get nine.)

Sulu (top) and Seven as kittens

Mackie took a year or so to decide to be a housecat

Mackie – aka Blackie. Age unknown. He started showing up at our house looking for food, already an adult, unfixed tom cat. There were cats before him that looked similar – Sylvester, Whiteface, that eventually disappeared, but for two or three years, we had a crowd of black and white toms hanging around in the evening. Mackie was unusual because he would go into the backyard and look through our windows and sleep on the deck furniture. I tried several times to bring him inside when he was in a weakened state, but he was clearly miserable and desperate to get back out. One day I caught him and managed to get him neutered that same day, then let him go again. He came back. Finally, I just moved him into the house and after bribing him with treats and sleeping on the floor with him a few nights, he decided to become an indoor cat. He likes my husband, and he loves some of my other cats, and he sleeps in our bed. But he is still nervous and apprehensive. At least he isn’t outside in the rain and snow, looking in our window anymore. (Named changed from the identifier Blackie to Mackie because Mackie is more politically correct.)

BeeGee – aka the black girl cat. She would come running down the block when I was feeding the
tomcats and want some, too. Then she would return to a foreclosed house that stayed empty for a couple of years. We think her owners just left her behind. She never showed up pregnant or brought any kittens around, and sure enough, when I finally caught her and took her to a vet, she had been fixed already. Her age is also unknown, and she despises all other cats. So she either sleeps in a box in a closet or under the bed, and the rest of the time, she wants to stay outside. She still goes down the

BeeGee has no interest in being a housecat

block to her old house, but comes back to us every day. I have to carry her in because she won’t walk past any other cat. (BeeGee is the first letters of Black Girl, which is how we described her when she was one of many strays in the yard, and Baby Girl, which is what my husband calls all female cats.) May 7, 2016 I noticed with alarm a huge wound near her anus, even though she was displaying no sign of pain or discomfort. I took her to the in-and-out quick vet who was open on Saturday mornings and they couldn't tell me what it was, and just gave me products to clean it. It may be cancer, and I don't have the money to save her, and it's probably too late anyway at this point.

Jordy

Jordy – Last summer (2015), I was going in late for work and decided to drive through the neighborhood next to ours just for no reason. There’s an open field across from a cemetery in there, and I saw three cats walking across the field, three different sizes. Big, middle and small. Jordy was the middle-sized one, the only one who didn’t run away when I stopped my car. He let me pick him right up. I took him home. I thought he had already been fixed in a feral catch-and-release program because his ear was clipped, but he still had one testicle. At the vet, we found the other one was undescended, so he had to have the female operation to be fixed. To acclimate him to my yard, so he wouldn’t run back the five blocks to that field, I would keep him in a cage in the yard during the day for an hour or two. He was probably born in the fall or winter of 2014-15. (He had an infected eye when I caught him and I should have named him Popeye because he always squinted, but since we had a Star Trek theme going, he was named for Geordi LaForge, who is a blind Star Trek Second Generation character, but Geordi is an unpronounceable spelling of Jordy. I didn’t want the vets calling out “Geo are dee.” My married last name Jorgenson is always mispronounced as George Jetson or George Johnson. Jordy has issues with getting feces stuck in the dense fur around his hindquarters and screams and fights if you try to clean him, so he had to be shaved. Now he has a respiratory infection he caught from Cat Daddy.

Odo

Odo – Odo followed Jordy. I think Odo was the little cat in the field. A week after I caught Jordy, Odo just showed up in my backyard, sitting next to Jordy’s cage. He hid under the deck for a month before I was able to catch him and bring him in the house, but it’s been nine months now and he hasn’t let me touch him since to get him to the vet. He adores Jordy and Mackie and hangs with them and has never tried to escape. Odo was probably born in the spring or winter of 2015 since he was pretty small when he first showed up, and played like a kitten. He would push a pebble all around the deck. That was his toy. He still looks like a kitten. The big-head and shoulders of a tomcat have yet to happen. We were positive he was a girl and didn’t see his underside until he’d been in the house for a month. (Obviously, the shape shifter from Deep Space Night. He shifted from female to male, here to there, outside to in.)

Cat Daddy – May have been the third, biggest cat I saw in the field. He showed up about a month after Odo, in the fall, sitting in my front yard and yelling loudly every time I came outside, even though he ran from me if I approached. So I would feed him. I thought a very pretty cat I called Fluffy would be the next stray I took in, but Cat Daddy would eat all the food and Fluffy stopped coming around. Another similar cat, Fluffy II, would pass through occasionally. And two more black and white tomcats that look less healthy than all the rest. Lokai, who has one all white leg and one all black leg, has been the most persistent in waiting out Cat Daddy. But then Cat Daddy became deathly ill, so ill, I was able to pick him up and bring him inside. The first vet thought he was just tired, maybe had worms, so I got him shots, wormed, and flea meds. But he was still too weak to go back out, so I took him to another vet, who said his red blood cell count was almost non-existent, he was so anemic, and had a cold virus, too. They kept him and pumped him full of antibiotics for three days. So $800 dollars later, Cat Daddy is still in the house, still kind of lethargic, and still not fixed. He has a great appetite, and another round of antibiotics to go through, but he’s still anemic and I don’t know how he would do as a free-roaming outside cat again. But he doesn’t seem real thrilled to be inside. Age unknown, but was a fully grown adult male when I first saw him. (Named Cat Daddy because his coloring is just like Jordy’s, so we pretended he was Jordy’s father.)

Cat Daddy

Update: After Cat Daddy pulled down the drapes and peeled up the linoleum by the front door, I finally decided to let him back out. He seemed better health-wise, and I assumed he might stay around and I could get him back in at night. Jordy caught his virus, and even Seven has sneezed a few times, so the house was getting toxic with 10 cats. Because he's still unfixed, he has a male cat odor that was permeating the house. So I let him out. At first he stayed in the front yard, but then he disappeared. Maybe he went back to his home, if he has one. They will be surprised to see him again after a month, with a shaved front leg where he got IV antibiotics.

Update January 2017: He came back, we got him fixed. He stays indoors now content, and if he goes out, he doesn't leave the yard. He's getting really big. 

RIP: My cats, Niki and Yoda, who lived to be 18 and 17, grew up with my son, left with me when I got divorced, and were my only companions for six years between the divorce and my next husband.

RIP: Red and Merly, the two one-year-old cats that came with my current husband. Red lived a long, full life to 17, although Merly got cancer when she was around 12 or 13 and died in a couple of months after the diagnosis.

RIP: Arbee, the first cat my current husband and I acquired together. We had her for nearly 15 years. Born feral, she was never a lap cat and almost as impossible to handle or touch as Odo, who is impossible. Because of that, we seldom were able to take her to the vet, and missed whatever made her die, but she was around 16. Might have been a tumor inside her cheek.

Odo the Shape Shifter

Well, Odo, much to our surprise, turned out to be a boy cat, not the girl we had thought. One day he rolled over enough for me to detect testicles and each month they get more visible, although his head and shoulders aren't growing yet as tomcats do. He still seems very kitten-sized, although he actually is almost as big as Neelix now. And we still haven't touched him. He cringes and runs from any hand. He has never tried to escape the house, though, and follows us from room to room. Mackie adores him and gives him baths every day and plays with him. I don't know how I am going to get him to the vet to get fixed. He's been inside four months now and no progress on his trusting us enough to touch him. Also, as of this post, Neelix is still alive.

Update: Neelix died in June 2017.

Update: January 2018. We still have never touched him. He won't let us get near, but he still seems happy to live here. When he gets out in the yard, he stays gone only a few hours and then we spot him hanging around the back door. If we prop it open and hide, he walks right back in.

Taking Down the Cemetery

My in-laws are downsizing and moving to a one-story house closer in, as retirees tend to do, so I am losing my pet cemetery in the heavily wooded part of their lot in a neighboring county.

It was a great cemetery, accessible by a makeshift path and overlooking a very deep creek bed below. When we arrived with our first cat to bury, Merly, there were already two others on the bluff, my sister-in-law's cat, Elvis, and my other sister-in-law's dog Beagle Bailey. We sort of knew about Bailey, but Elvis was only discovered because we hit a towel after digging into the perfect spot and my husband became suspicious the grave was already occupied.

It was a very hot July day. My in-laws were at the beach so we were alone at the house and this was our first shared pet to die on us, and we were distraught. Somehow, my husband's eyeglasses fell out of his breast pocket into the grave and he didn't notice they were gone until he was done refilling Elvis' grave. So he had to dig the hole again.

We found the second best spot and left Merly there with many tears, arriving back home with many ticks on us. Over the seasons, we'd add a ceramic marker with her name and more big rocks. Then we added another cat, Red, also in July. This time my husband was leaving to play a show in West Virginia the morning she died, so I had to go to the cemetery alone and get my stepfather-in-law to dig the grave.

This past February, we made our first winter outing to the cemetery to bury Arbee, and this time when we came back weeks later with the ceramic marker, we added more rocks purchased from a quarry to all the graves and colorful pinwheels that spun in the breeze and communicated comfort to the matching pinwheels in my yard at home.

But I don't want to leave all that to strangers who will be buying the house. It is time to part. It is not unbearable. My first cat of 18 years, is buried in the yard of my husband's childhood home, which has since been sold and is no longer accessible to us. Her companion, who lived to 17, was buried in my in-law's first house, which they sold. That time they exhumed all the dogs in their yard for cremation, and my cat was in the crowd. Her ashes reside in a little doghouse on their mantle. I really don't think about her being there or anywhere. And after 20 years, it's hard to remember those two at all.

They are gone. I have too many still here to worry about: Neelix, the oldest and living with nasal cancer for almost two years now, frail as a stick; Chatter, overweight and tail-less, and still into everyone's business, the supervisor of all the other cats; Kira, the little cross-eyed mother, as lovable as a doll; her two, huge, Maine Coon-like lazy sons, Sulu and Seven; the stray cat Mackie who stared in our window for years before finally being persuaded to move in; BeeGee, the sleek black female who hates all the other cats and either has to be closed in her own room or outside. She still waits for her original owners to come back. They left her behind several years ago to roam the block and figure things out for herself. Then there's the two who just came since August, Jordan, the happy little stray with the tipped ear who still had testicles anyway, one inside and one outside, and his tiny, devoted companion Odo, who traveled five blocks through the neighborhood to find out where her friend had gone, and somehow found him. She is so skittish, it was a miracle I was finally able to sneak up behind her while Chatter was distracting her and scruff her and get her into the house. We see her playing across the room, but we still can't approach her. I hope we got her before she went into heat.

Neelix Update and New Wave of Cats

Neelix, July 2015

Neelix is still with us, and still about the same. Some days he doesn't eat, and we go into panic mode, thinking the end is near. Twice in the last 60 days or so, he had an issue with bleeding gums. Two vets looked, but not very closely. They are quick to dismiss it as the tumor coming through since it is on the same side.

Still, the gums stop bleeding within hours, and eventually Neelix resumes eating. His face always looks battle-scarred from either the stretching over the tumor or something coming out of his eyes. But still he maintains.

Jordy, not sure if the indoor life is for him

Meanwhile, after a car accident in May that wasn't my fault but totaled my car, and my gallbladder suddenly acting up and being removed, it has been a rough summer and I got out of the habit of trying to get to work on time. I drive to various places I can catch a local bus. One morning, I cut through a part of our neighborhood that I never cut through. There's really no reason to go that way. It just puts you on the same main road in a different place. But I did it.

And there were three cats of various sizes crossing a field. Of course, I stopped and jumped out, like I always do when I see cats along the road, and two ran off. The third, the middle-sized one, did not. In fact, it rolled over to greet me and let me scoop it up. I caught a cat! That almost never happens. I returned home, the cat sitting on the dashboard in confusion.

It has a weepy eye that had burned off all the hair around that eye, so he looked pretty bad. So he's been in the house three weeks now, gone to the vet twice. The hair around his eye is growing back. He has a notched ear, which means he was part of a feral cat catch and release operation, but they did a poor job. He still has one testicle, which is coming off this week. Whether or not Jordy -- named after Geordi La Forge, who also had eye problems -- stays with us is unknown. He cries to go out most of the time.

Jordy wondering why this big cat Sulu gets the best seat in the house

And now...a kitten showed up in our yard this week, and I swear it looks like the third cat -- the smallest one -- I spotted the day I scooped up Jordy. Did this kitten figure out where Jordy had gone and make the five block journey on his own? He or she comes out at dusk and hangs out in the backyard until it is very dark, but we can't get near him (or her). One evening I had Jordy out in a cage in the backyard and the kitten came and cuddled up with him through the netting.

Spring Cleaning at the Pet Cemetery

Neelix Models

Kimie from http://www.iyqphotography.com took these photos of Neelix for Fetch a Cure's Companion in Crisis program. Here's some of my favorites. She normally does wedding and engagement type photography.

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.