Cat-astrophe

I thought that I’d gone through all the “firsts” since Bunny died, but there was one I overlooked: veterinary crises.  I suppose it’s a testament to my cats’ good health that that none of the four needed major medical care in the past year and a half.   That streak was broken Saturday evening, when I rushed one of my babies to the emergency vet.

My cats are Bono (male, aged 11), Kieran (male, 8), Sierra (female, 5) and Shiloh (female, 5).   I’ve had cats all my life, and though Bunny had never had a cat until we married, he loved them as much as I did.  The most we ever had at a time was five, when we lived in Georgia.  In May of 2008, the last of our Georgia cats (Penelope) died.    After a few months, we made a trip to the local animal shelter to look for a baby girl.  I’m not averse to adopting older cats—Bono was a year and a half when we brought him home—but I’ve found that the newcomer is better accepted if he/she falls at the bottom of the chronological totem pole. 

Even though Bono was considered older (by shelter standards) when we adopted him, he was a spring chicken compared to Penelope and Lilah, the matriarch of the Georgia cat family.  We used to joke that the three of them were like the cast of the old Cary Grant movie, Arsenic and Old Lace.  Bono was the young man and Lilah and Penelope were the elder aunts.

Of all the cats we’d lost over the years, Lilah’s death affected Bunny the most.  Lilah was, hands-down, the smartest cat who ever lived: I’m not exaggerating when I say she was more intelligent than most people.    Within a week after we moved to Georgia, Bunny had chosen her from the litter of cats one of his co-workers brought to the office.  She was the runt, and Bunny had an affinity for underdogs—or undercats, in this case.  Ever the nerd, he was also immediately impressed with her intelligence, and showed her an inordinate amount of favoritism.   She was 18 when she died—a respectable old age, by cat standards—and Bunny grieved her loss until his death.   He wasn’t happy to be dying, but he looked forward to reuniting with Lilah on the other side. 

Because he’d had such success at cat-picking in the past, Bunny always insisted on accompanying me when we added to the family.   It always breaks my heart to go into animal shelters—so many beautiful animals, all wanting a home.  How do you choose?  I never leave a shelter dry-eyed or empty-handed.   On that day in August, we walked into the cat room and looked for a kitten.    On what would prove our last shelter visit together, it didn’t take long before Bunny spotted a tiny little Siamese-looking fluff ball reaching an arm through the cage door to get his attention.   He called me over to look at her, and I noticed an equally small, solid gray, furry ball huddled at the back of the cage. 

“They’re litter mates,” the shelter attendant explained.

“Aw!  We can’t split them up,” I lamented.

“We’ll take them both!” Bunny said, with great authority.   I later joked that he sounded like the Rockefeller of cats.

We brought (Siamese-looking) Sierra  and (furry gray) Shiloh home a week later, after they’d had been spayed and vaccinated.  Kieran took to them fairly quickly, but not Bono.  He was NOT happy that we’d brought these two adorable little mischief-makers into his domain.   I was surprised at his reaction, because almost three years before he had immediately accepted Kieran and had even tutored him in the fine art of lizard-catching. 

Finally, Bono warmed to Sierra, but he’s always been a bit aloof toward Shiloh.  It’s almost like he decided that the boys would form teams, with Sierra on his side and Shiloh on Kieran’s.   The dynamic is like this: the boys will fight (wrestling that gets too aggressive), and each of the boys will occasionally hassle the girl from the other team, but the girls do not pick fights with the boys, or with each other.   Overall, though, they get along well.

Back to Saturday evening:  I had just fed the cats, and they were all fine.  After they ate, Shiloh and Kieran moved from the kitchen to the dining room chairs.  To digest, I suppose.  A few minutes later, Kieran came into the living room with Shiloh trailing him, limping.  Strange—she had been perfectly normal a few minutes before.

“What’s wrong with your leg?” I asked.  I watched her for a few seconds more; clearly, she was in pain.  Then she started wailing.  Sierra and Kieran rushed to help her, and she swatted them away.  Even Bono came to offer his assistance, but she hissed at him.   My sweet baby girl would never have done that under normal circumstances: she wants everybody to love her, especially Bono.

I picked her up to assess her leg, but didn’t see anything wrong.  No blood, no foreign objects, no swelling.  When I touched the leg, she screamed even louder.  I anxiously loaded her into a pet taxi and headed to a local veterinary ER.  This was hardly my first trip to a pet ER, but it had been several years since the last one.   To me, it’s much more traumatic having an injured pet than an injured child: the child can tell you what hurts, and understands that you’re taking him/her to the hospital, and can be comforted, at least to some extent. 

In the past, I’d very rarely gone to the pet ER without Bunny—if he wasn’t with me, it was because he wasn’t home at the time.   One of us would cradle the patient and the other would drive.   Now, without anyone to comfort Shiloh, I wove through what seemed an extraordinary amount of traffic as she wailed as loudly as an ambulance.  My ears were ringing and my nerves were badly frayed by the time we arrived.

From her symptoms, I figured she’d fractured a toe or two, though I couldn’t understand how. The x-rays proved me partially right—she’d fractured all the toes on her right foot.  She spent the remainder of the weekend at the hospital, comforted by kitty morphine.  She had surgery on Monday—the fractures were fixed and secured with a metal plate.  Yes, my cat now has a metal plate in her foot.

Some of you (and I know who some of you are) may now think I sound like the stereotypical cat lady.  You know what?  I don’t care.  Anybody who knows me knows that I am very attuned to how my cats—or any animals—feel.   While Shiloh was in the hospital, I was less worried about her than I was about Sierra.  The girls had never been apart in their lives, and they spend a good deal of their time together.  Sierra is the bold, adventurous, independent sister; Shiloh is the cautious, sweet, loving one.   When they were babies, Shiloh would watch anxiously as Sierra blazed trails, and would only attempt the new activity once she saw her sister complete it successfully.    

     

Sierra was unusually subdued while her sister was away, looking out the front door from time to time, as if she expected her to pull up in a cab.  Likewise, Kieran was more quiet than usual, and at bedtime he snuggled more tightly against me than normal.   I visited Shiloh several times during her hospitalization, bringing her news of how much her siblings missed her, even Bono.

Finally, she came home today.  My sister Jan, also a cat lover, had warned me that the others would probably hiss at her once she came back, because she would smell like the vet’s office.  I was already anticipating this response, so I reintroduced her slowly.  I left her in the pet taxi for awhile, so they could sniff her and kiss her through the bars.  After that, I moved her into her recovery suite—the master bath.

She is very slowly adapting to her cast—at first, she growled at it so much that I called the surgeon to ask whether she didn’t need more pain medicine.  As it turns out, cats don’t like casts.  She also has a Cone of Shame to wear when I’m not around to watch her, in case she tries to chew off the cast.   She’s nowhere near mastered the art of walking with the cast, and gets around mainly by rolling on the floor.  I know that because I peeked in the first time I heard the clomp-growl-clomp-growl combo of the cast hitting the floor and Shiloh growling at it.

Her siblings are being incredibly gentle with her.  I think they’re still a bit intimidated by all the growling.  We will slowly get back to normal, having weathered the latest crisis.   In fact, as I write this, Shiloh has rolled her way over to her favorite sleeping spot, under my bed.   Now, hopefully, any other firsts I haven’t thought of are only good ones.