My Old Lady, a Little Older

This week’s worry is Josie. I wrote not too long ago, after her most recent visit to the doctor, that Josie was, with the exception of the infection she was then suffering, in very good shape for a sixteen year old cat. I think that has changed.

I have noted what I think is a sudden deterioration in my Chubs’s condition. She seems more frail than she had been even a week ago. She is moving more slowly, and she is much more hesitant when deciding to drop to the floor from the bedroom cat-trees.

I am once more giving her joint-medicine, though only thrice a week, and I have brought the small staircase from the sitting room couch and put it beside the bed. No one has used those steps since Cammie could see, and now the cats have four methods of ascending to and descending from the bed (three staircases, and straight across the computer desk to the cat-trees via the window ledge.) Josie often drops off the near side of the bed to get to Cammie’s bowl for a drink of water, and this will give her a less abrupt route. However, I think I need another means to make getting down from the cat-trees easier, as well.

My old lady is eating Z/D hard-food now almost exclusively. She went off of soft-food when she came back from the doctor the last time. She doesn’t eat a great deal, though I provide it whenever she asks and often when she doesn’t. I don’t think she resorts to the communal bowl of Orijen hard-food at all, and I can’t leave any Z/D out where Josie can get to it during the day because Neville would suck up the contents in a minute. But the Z/D hard-food kept Cammie going for several years before she decided that she liked the soft variety of the brand, too (which Josie does not.)

The Great White also seems a bit confused at times, going to the water-bowl and then standing, staring off into space, as if she has forgotten why she walked there. She sometimes needs food pointed out to her several times, even after she requests it. These may appear little things, and have innocent explanations, but when they come as changes to routine behaviour, questions must be asked.

I may take Josie to the doctor again; further tests might reveal what has happened to her. In truth, I suspect that age has caught up with her suddenly, as it does with many humans. But I will watch her and, if the situation warrants it, take her to the hospital. This is the part of having a cat that no one tells a prospective cat-owner about, yet it is, in many ways, the most important period of a feline life, the part at which they need their human the most. I don’t want to let my old lady down.

Jessel Goes Home

Jessel has gone home. This abrupt turn of events will, eventually, prove happy for him, but it is bittersweet right now.

Some of you who have been reading this blog recall when Jessel first showed up at Café Cosy. It was the first week of June. It took a long time to determine if he was feral (he was not) and if he was not feral, how socialised he was. Because of my findings, I decided to trap him and have him neutered, which I suspected he was not already. The rescue-group to which I belong, the Lethbridge PAW Society, would take him in, have him examined and treated by a veterinary, and then offer him for adoption, after recovery in my home.

I’d always known he’d had his own home, and was lost or abandoned, though I thought, considering how friendly he was, the latter option was unlikely; he appeared to have come from a loving place. I had looked for notices and advertisements that would have indicated that he was missing from his home, but found no indication that someone was looking for him - until the day of his neutering. How I missed the post on our local ‘lost and found pets’ site, I don’t know, but there he was.

He had a different name, of course, but the pictures displayed showed Jessel, down to the smallest similarity - there was even a whisker that curved over his brow and stuck to the fur on the top of his head with a little curl. Thereafter, things moved swiftly. Jessel returned home this morning.

He didn’t go without a fight, since he objected to being placed in a cat-carrier, the day after his last journey in one resulted in his medical mutilation (neutering). I feel bad about that. The little fellow had come to trust me. Even after he slipped from my grasp at my first attempt to capture him this morning, he leaned into my hand while I stroked his face. I felt like I was breaking his trust.

However, as was pointed out to me, if he had stayed with me in foster-care, I would have betrayed that trust eventually when he was adopted, and I would have put him in another carrier. Perhaps it’s as well that he left earlier than later.

The couple who collected Jessel seemed very nice and responsible. They told me that Jessel (though they called him something else) had cut through a screen (probably at the urgings of his non-neutered body). The screens have been replaced; Jessel will be, as he had been, an insider-cat. He didn’t recognise the people who had come for him: he had been missing since early May; besides, they were wearing masks. This no doubt contributed to Jessel’s panic.

But he has a feline sister and a feline brother, and a human sibling who misses him greatly. He has been fixed, tested for various illnesses (and found negative) and bolstered by some injections. This and a loving family will set him fair for a long, happy and healthy life.

But I will miss Young Blue Eyes.

Absent for the Night

Neville is mildly interested in what Jessel might be like. I’ve caught him outside the library door a few times. Saturday evening, movie-night, I put the new boy in the bathroom for a couple of hours so that Renn could watch the film with me. (He slept through it, actually, but I was glad that he wanted to keep me company in the library; he spent twenty minutes sniffing about the room.)

Nev lie down outside the closed bathroom door for half an hour. I don’t know if he thought Jessel was going to come out to meet him, but I suppose he wanted to be ready for that eventuality. I told him not to expect too much: Jessel may not be with us long.

Tonight, Jessel isn’t with us at all. He is going to be neutered tomorrow, and the surgery will be early, but not early enough for me to be home when his transport comes to take him to the hospital. I will be at work. So Young Blue Eyes will, unfortunately, be at the hospital for the night. He will come back to the Cosy Apartment tomorrow, and spend as long as he likes recovering, hopefully in comfort. I am anticipating no serious side-effects to his operation, though any good thoughts you would like to spare for my little guest will be appreciated.

 

The Return to Realland

My holidays are now over. I left Idylland today and have returned to Realland.

Despite a rocky start - Josie just getting over her urinary tract infection, Renn with a bowel bug and something hitting me, too - the holidays were enjoyable. I trapped Jessel, and he is on his way to becoming available for adoption. I was able to relax, and to sleep more than usual, though I still don’t think it’s enough. It’s my belief that the world would benefit immensely if everyone could have twenty-four hours’ uninterrupted sleep. I know I would.

Nonetheless, it is back to work tomorrow. Autumn is starting to make itself felt, as are the terrible forest fires burning in the United States. The sunlight here has been glowing with an otherworldly yellow hue for the past week. While rather beautiful, its cause is ugly, and I could easily dispense with it. As well, the air here smells like a house is in flames just down the street.

It will be hard to re-adjust to a work-schedule. I seem to fall into a holiday routine much faster – certainly more willingly – than I emerge from it. With luck, I will have my next year’s holiday at their normal time. But first, I want to get through the rest of 2020. That may be enough to keep one occupied…

Smooth and Soft

Due to regular meals of a good quality, clean water, a stress-reduced environment and plenty of time to devote to grooming, Jessel’s fur is becoming smooth and soft. He is conscientious in his hygiene. As a result, his hair is seen to be of a striking pattern, filled with colour, from dark puce to blond to a coppery hue. He had arrived with a flattened burr embedded in the fur of his tail, and I wasn’t able to grasp it well or long enough to pull it out; it was strongly fixed. Several days after his arrival, I came into the library early one morning to find what looked like the remnants of a cat-fight: bits of hair all over. But it was the successful conclusion of what was probably a night-long struggle against the burr. Jessel removed it on his own.

His appetite is becoming normal, I think. After initially eating all he was given, and swiftly, he is leaving small portions when he is sated. This is, I suspect, a sign that he realises his meals will be coming regularly from now on. At the other end, Jessel’s litter-box habits are excellent: he wets a decent amount once or twice a day and poops, on average, twice every three days; it is a big amount and smells strongly enough to rival Renn’s. That’s quite a boast.

In terms of food, behaviour, litter-box routines and cleanliness, my new foster-cat has shown himself an easy-going fellow who takes things as they come. This all bodes well for his eventual adoption – and suggests that Jessel has some lessons that would be good for anyone to learn.