Thank you

I just wanted to take a minute to express my gratitude for all the comments and messages here on this blog, on Facebook and Twitter and in private e-mail that I have received from people in the wake of Blair's death. Support of family and friends makes things like this easier. Life is slowly returning to normal around here and while his absence is still rather acute, I know for a fact that Heidi and Anna are going to the Story County Animal Shelter tomorrow to look at kittens - just to LOOK. We can't and won't get anything until after Kylie (which is in 29 days!!) and after the three remaining cats have been to the vet and are all updated on their shots and what not.

Thanks again to family and friends both near and far.

Black cat, nine lives

I'm going to try to write this even though I am completely wiped. Putting it off a day seems wrong. Today was the day that the end came for our cat Blair, the second of our cats to be diagnosed with terminal cancer last year and the second to shuffle off the mortal coil.

This was a lot harder for me on so many more levels than when we had to let Mia go last November. The biggest reason for this is because Blair was really my baby boy cat. From the minute I heard him meowing in a neighbor's flower garden across a busy street in Washington, IA, I knew that he and I were going to have a special relationship. Up until that time, I had not really been a cat person. I became a pseudo-cat person mostly because I realized that if I wanted to spend my life with Heidi, that was going to involve cats. Blair (who was named after The Blair Witch Project, which was a popular movie that summer) really got to me though. He was the first cat of ours that I bonded with as a kitten and in many ways, we tricked him into thinking I was his mother. In the first days that we had him, he would get in bed with me every morning and would always fall for the "moving finger under the blanket" trick. He pounced every time. He would nip at you and bite which led to his early nickname of "Black Bite-y."

He was hell on wheels - I'd never seen a kitten get into so much trouble. He crawled up in the arms of the couch, pulled an entire box of Stove-Top stuffing out of a cupboard and walked around with it in his mouth. He hijacked a package of English muffins and squirreled them away in our bedroom closet, where we uncovered them six months later, moldy and gross. Even though we had two other cats in the house, we knew it was him. No one else would have taken the time or the effort. As he grew, he got into more trouble, jumping from the floor to the top of the refrigerator and even ending up inside the refrigerator once after sneaking in there all stealth-like when we had opened it. Only his meowing led us to find him, sitting on the second shelf as if he belonged there.

He grew quickly - a friend of ours always asked me if we were feeding him Miracle-Gro. He was always a handsome cat and I swear that he had to have had Siamese in him. He grew fond of crawling up on my chest in the morning before I woke up. When you wake up with a 14 pound cat on your chest, it becomes difficult to differentiate between that and "the big one." When he wasn't sitting on my chest, he was crawling under the blanket and laying next to me all stretched out like a human would. None of our cats before or since have done that. He kind of grew out of that for a while, but in the last 6 months, he started doing that again. It was almost as if he knew that his time was limited and wanted to remind me of what it was like before he was sick.

The thing about Blair was that he had neuroses that had neuroses. We first noticed this when we discovered that he was losing all the hair on his legs - a consequence of over-grooming, a nervous habit among cats who are stressed out. We tried to medicate him for this, but it proved nearly impossible without getting an arm taken off. We managed it as best we could, but when we moved and Sidney showed up on our back deck and became the 5th cat in our house (never again), his anxiety went into the stratosphere. He started peeing outside of the litter box - his favorite places being on the front door and on the floor in Heidi's office closet. Because of this, we spent $600 on a full work-up on him to make sure that there wasn't something physically wrong with him that was causing him to pee all over the place or if it truly was just a behavioral problem. As I suspected, there wasn't anything wrong with him physically. The stress brought on by Sidney basically pushed him over the edge.

My dad built a cage for him so that we could isolate him and basically retrain him to use the litter box. It worked for the most part, although he still had his lapses. We started him on Prozac which we would rub on his ear and that also seemed to help some. His peeing continued and we just kept on cleaning it up. I sanded down the wood floors where he had peed and resealed them. There were points during that time that I'm not proud of. I was so tired of cleaning up pee, with him wrecking floors and not knowing what was wrong with him that I seriously entertained the notion of euthanizing him then. After euthanizing him today, I know now that I was all talk. There was no way on God's green earth that I could have killed him for his behavior.

When he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma last fall, he had wasted away and had hardly any fat on him. The vet said that his prognosis was quite poor. He was so sick with a respiratory tract infection last fall when Heidi was gone to Texas to visit her sister that my only goal was to keep him alive until she got back. He rallied like no one's business, kicked his infection and started gaining weight once we put him on steroids and antibiotics. His mouth, which had been full of sores, healed up. He was on the mend and he lulled us into a false sense of security. Maybe the diagnosis had been wrong...maybe he was going to be around for years to come.

The honeymoon was short-lived. He went through countless rounds of antibiotics. He knew the sound of me grinding the tablet in the mortar and pestle I bought so that we could more easily administer it to him - when he heard it, he would hide. Last week, we found a lump on his belly. Thinking it was a sign of his cancer advancing, we took him to the vet. They aspirated it and found it to be only a cyst, but to keep an eye on it. Three days later, he was sneezing and wheezing and not responding to the antibiotic. We switched antibiotics and despite the fact that it should have killed just about everything, he still got no better. Over the weekend, he stopped eating and drinking. The last time we know that he peed was Friday. He was vomiting up snot and phlegm and despite my attempts to keep him clean, the snot crusted on his nose and face. Yesterday, sensing that his end was near, I went up and sat with him in Heidi's office. He laid down next to me and snuggled up to my leg. By the evening hours, he had curled up into a ball under Heidi's desk, and got all quiet and still. I was sure that I would be gone this morning. He was still alive, but miserable.

In many ways, I felt bonded to Blair because of our similar struggles with anxiety. I always felt a little bit like giving up on him was giving up on me. That was why it was so hard to make the call this morning which was his death sentence. I hated the responsibility of saying "you die now." Once we had the appointment set up, I kept thinking "Blair only has x amount of time to live." He was a little more alert at the time than I would have liked, although he was calm because of the sedative we gave him at home. He twitched his tail and growled one last time at the vet while she found the vein. He laid his head down and was twitching his tail. After the injection was about half done, his tail stopped twitching. I like to think that he fell asleep and didn't feel the pain anymore, because not long after, he was gone. It's not cool to say so, but I was heartbroken. My little black cat was no more and I haven't been that sad in a long time.

Cancer won, like it so often does despite our best efforts. But he didn't have to suffer. That's the gift we can give to our pets. As he died, Madonna's "Crazy For You" played on the radio. It seemed appropriate.

But as someone said to me, whenever we lose anyone, it's not the ending but the time before that matters. Sure I'm sad. Sure I'll miss him. I was eating supper tonight and swore that I saw his little black head walk by, only to realize that wasn't possible. But I will remember all the times, good and bad, that we gave him and that he gave us. We gave him a good life. So many people would have given up on Blair but we didn't. And we loved him through it all, even at the worst. Even when I was talking crazy about euthanizing him for peeing, I still loved that cat. In many ways, he was the bitchiest cat that ever lived, but we saw the side of him that so few saw. Whatever the cat version of love is, he had it for us. He snuggled up on my lap almost without fail every time I sat down to watch TV. He hung out with Heidi in her office during the day. He very frequently laid on Anna's bed while she fell asleep. He left pieces of himself around - and not just the bits of hair we shaved from his body today. When Anna was an infant, he inadvertently scratched her head and eyelid, leaving a faint scar that is mostly hidden by her hairline. She said to me last night "Dad, I'm glad Blair scratched me, because now I have a piece of him forever." Way to make lemonade out of lemons, kid.

What a difference a week makes!

He was a good cat, even when he was a shit cat, because he was MY cat. He was my baby boy cat and now he's gone. He's not hurting anymore, but I sure do miss him.

One Christmas, we made CDs for people - one for each of the four cats we had at the time. Blair's contribution was "Blair's Bad-Ass Tunes." And naturally, the last track was Janet Jackson's "Black Cat." If any cat really had nine lives, it was Blair. He lived way past his prognosis, but it still wasn't easy to let him go.

RIP, buddy. This one's for you. If she sings it at the State Fair, you know I'll think of you and smile.

Cat barf

I am tired beyond my capacity to even articulate it, but I can't go to bed. Not yet anyway, because I am waiting for the damn sheets to finish drying.

I got a text from Heidi right before I left work saying that there was "serious barf" on the bed and that she needed me to start the cleanup process. When she said serious, she wasn't kidding. Mia had gotten sick on our bed (as she has done several times in the last few weeks, always necessitating a complete changing of the sheets.) I started the washer at 5:30PM. It is 11:12 PM and the goddamn mattress pad is still drying. It really needs to hang out on a clothesline as it gets all bunched up on itself in the dryer and just doesn't dry right. I thought it was dry earlier and when I went to put it on the bed just now, it was so NOT dry I'm not sure how I thought it was earlier.

Truth be told, I'm so sick of cat barf I could just barf myself. But with five cats, cat barf is kind of a fact of life around these parts. And with Mia especially. It's kind of hard to get mad at her for barfing considering her terminal cancer. It doesn't make it any easier when you are trying to go to bed and you can't because a cat has unceremoniously puked all over your pillow and bed sheets 5 hours ago (FIVE!! Why are we still waiting for these sheets to dry?) but you try to put it in perspective. At least we're going to be afforded the luxury of being alive for what is hopefully a lot longer. No matter how you slice it, Mia is at the end of hers. We don't know when the end will come, but we're enjoying every single day we get with her because it really is a gift.

Even when she barfs all over the bed.

So for now, I'll keep cleaning up her sick because one of these days she won't be around to get sick anymore and we'll say "remember how Mia always used to barf?" and we'll laugh about it.

But right at this moment, I just want to sleep. And I think I'm going to go try now.

The stiletto cuts quick

Since Heidi is away on her mini-break with her good friend Shelly in Iowa City, I guess it falls to me to do the Walter updates. The short version of the story is that, as of yesterday morning, he was STILL not eating or drinking appreciably. I measured out a cup of water into his dish and 8 hours laster, I measured what was left. Pretty much everything I had put in there was still there, so no oral intake of fluids. I had talked to the vet about this on Friday, so she had set aside a bag of IV fluids for us to pick up on Saturday morning in case he was still not taking fluids. On Saturday, we hopped on the bike and picked them up. All the while, I was trying to figure out what in the world I was going to hang that bag of fluids from.

I was feeling very MacGyver when I realized that I didn't exactly have an IV pole from which to hang the bag. What I ended up using was the drying rack we use for clothes that can't be dried. For a minute, I thought I might have to use a shoestring as well (if a piece of belly button lint had been needed, then I was DEFINITELY changing my name to MacGyver) but I managed to hook it over the top and it worked just fine.

I got the tubing hooked up and primed, and then put the needle on. Anna was helping me at this point, and no sooner did I take the shield off the needle than I stuck my left thumb with the 18 gauge needle. In the 13 years that I have been a pharmacist, I have never gotten a single needlestick. Until now. Of all the needles to do that with, it had to be the one that is pretty much like a knitting needle. Bleeding ensued. Anna was concerned. Fortunately, I healed quickly and we were able to get about 200 mL of fluid into Walter during the day yesterday.

Anna was a supremely helpful veterinary assistant, as the following photo demonstrates.

I seriously could not have done it without her help.

Last night before I went to bed, I noticed that a little bit of the salmon that I had put in the cage for him to eat had disappeared, so things are looking up again. I am kind of weighing the pros and cons of doing another 100-200mL of subcutaneous fluids today, but I also don't want to fluid overload him. So we'll see. He's a little perkier today and his nose is wet, which it had not been for the last several days.

Also, courtesy of Hans (Heidi's brother), a statue of Bast arrived in the mail yesterday. What a good guy!


(Bonus points and my instant friendship to anyone who can identify the source of this post's title. And no fair Googling!)

Heart failed at the top of the staircase

...instead of in the back of a taxi.

Those of you keeping up with Heidi's blog have seen the transformation of our TV/family room from a 70s hell with dark wood paneling and stained carpet to a fabulously painted room with sealed hardwood floors. The sealing has been a tricky in this house of many cats. It has pretty much required us to seal the cats in different parts of the house. The three young men - Walter, Bingley and Sidney got the basement. We sealed the cat door at the top of the steps so as to prevent their escape onto the sticky floor above, but this did not stop one determined Walter from nearly clawing through the door in an attempt to escape his prison.

Between plaintive meows, we heard frantic scratching and clawing at the door, desperately trying to remove the cat door as if THE most exciting thing in the world was happening on the other side. Seriously, it sounded like he was going to drop dead from heart failure in the next minute if we didn't let him out.

I am happy to report that he is still alive, ready to annoy and slobber another day.

It's been a really good remodel of the room. It's been difficult, but I think we're really going to like it once we're all done. And unbelievably, it has not been all that expensive. It helped immensely that we didn't have to rent a floor sander (although when we do the floors in the back bedroom, there is no doubt in my mind that we will be renting it for that job.) We only have several more coats of polyurethane to put on the floor, a job that is proving to be more difficult with each subsequent coat because it's harder and harder to tell where you've already been and where you have yet to go.

But it's very satisfying because it's something we've wanted to do since the day we moved in, and it is finally happening. So YAY for that.