I’m gearing up for another week at the Indie Ink Writing Challenge. After taking a week off, I’m happy to get back in the saddle.
But we’ve had quite a week over here in this corner of the blogoverse, and that, coupled with seemingly endless rehearsals for the Month of Moderns (Latvian and Swedish and Seneca, oh my!), has made me a little loopy.
Therefore, I bring you: ADORABLE KITTENS.
Itchy
These are pictures of Itchy and Scratchy when they were kittens, while they were still cute.
Scratchy
I’m just kidding. They’re still cute, even though they’re no longer kittens. Itchy & Scratchy, napping
I remember the first time I ever met him. I had just finished a performance of Carmen at the San Francisco Opera, and as I climbed into the car waiting outside the stage door, I heard a strange sound coming from the back seat.
“Look who I have with me,” my mother said with a smile. She pulled a box from the back and handed it to me.
There was something moving inside the box. It meowed.
Of course I knew I was getting a kitten. This was my gift from my mother for turning the ripe old age of eight, and I had actually visited the family of kittens a few days earlier to pick the one I wanted. When I had played with them all, I had decided on a gray striped kitten who had been very rambunctious. I knew that I was going to call him Tigger.
I opened the box with anticipation and found…a tiny black kitten.
No Tigger.
Confused, I looked up at my mom and said, “I think you got the wrong one.”
She sighed and apologized. Apparently, by the time she had gotten to the family’s home, there was only one kitten left, so she took him. “But,” she said, “he is Tigger’s brother, so I am sure he’s also going to be just as fun.”
I started petting him and he purred loudly.
“Plus,” she added, “black cats are way cooler than other cats. Some people think they have magical powers.”
A magical cat? That sounded like a trade up to me. “But…what should I name him? He’s not striped, so I can’t name him Tigger.” My exhausted eight-year-old brain was trying to come up with clever names. All I could come up with was “Kitty,” and I knew that was just dumb.
“What about Midnight? He’s as black as midnight, after all.”
Looking at this tiny little black ball of fur, I nodded in affirmation. As we drove home, I started telling him that his name was Midnight, and that we would be friends. By the time we had made the hour-long journey home into the far reaches of Marin County, I had dubbed him Sir Midnight of Forest Knolls.
As I grew up, he was my best friend. He comforted me through convalescence after a broken collarbone, a dislocated knee, and numerous sprained ankles. He loved watching me garden, and did his best to kill any bugs, newts, or birds that got in my way. His favorite napping spots were the porch, the laundry basket, and the roof (which he reached by climbing the plum tree that grew next to our house). He was incredibly intelligent, and learned how to open the sliding glass door for himself to let himself out.
We could never teach him how to close that same door, much to our chagrin.
When my mother’s boyfriend tried to molest me, Midnight knew. After that incident, he spent more time with me, on my lap and in my bed. When I fell into depression, Midnight would come over to me and sit on me. He would look at me with those big green eyes and tell me that he wasn’t going to let me kill myself, and if he had to sit on me to stop me from doing it, that’s what he would do. He weighed 20 lbs. He was not a small cat.
When I went away to college and my mom started dating a woman who was allergic to cats, Midnight had to leave the only home he had ever known. He lived with my dad for a year, but my stepmother complained bitterly about having a cat in the house. And so after my second year in college, it was decided that I would bring Midnight back to the East Coast to live with me in my new apartment.
I know he was traumatized by the plane trip, especially since the tranquilizer we had given him had worn off by the time my delayed flight finally touched ground in Boston. The poor cab driver had to hear him yowl all the way from Logan Airport to Powderhouse Square; I tipped him extra for his trouble.
Midnight lived for 13 years. He died of intestinal cancer that I had not been able to catch early on (I was a poor college student and didn’t take him to the vet very often). I wasn’t even there when they took him to the vet, because I was at a summer apprenticeship program. When my subletter/catsitter told me what was going on, I borrowed a friend’s car and drove from Rhode Island to Somerville. The vet explained that they could do surgery, but there wasn’t a very good chance that he’d have a good life after the surgery…plus, I couldn’t afford all those expenses; I could barely afford the cost of putting him down!
It was an extremely difficult choice, but I wanted Midnight to be happy. I could tell he wasn’t happy at all the way he was, and after all he had done for me, I knew I needed to be strong for him.
I watched as the doctor injected him. I petted him and told him I loved him.
He purred loudly. He knew I was there.
And then his purrs got quieter. His breathing slowed.
And then he was gone.
My pencil sketch of Midnight (1988)
I cried a lot that night. I drove over to my boyfriend’s house and spent the night sobbing in his arms. Midnight had been everything to me as I was young, and I blamed myself for not taking care of him better as we both got older. But I was still young then, and he was very old, and I know now that it was just his time to go.
I’d like to think that he’s still around, watching from afar. My husband and I now have two wonderful (and crazy) cats, Itchy and Scratchy, and I like to think that Midnight has given them tips on how to deal with me. Just because they’re not black cats doesn’t mean they don’t have magical powers, too.
After a full week of being outside, Itchy has decided to come home.
This is a HUGE relief to me, since I have been outside every single morning and evening with bowls of food, trying to coax him back, and I have the mosquito bites to prove it (by the way, there’s something about NJ that makes things grow extremely large…including mutant extra-large mosquitoes!). I had even started falling into a depression about this situation, mostly because I wasn’t getting very much sleep (getting up at 6:30 in the morning to spend a half hour outside, and then going outside again close to midnight) .
Itchy started off being very shy (as I wrote about before), but hunger started overriding his fear, and he would come up only when I had set the bowl about arm’s reach away. Then yesterday he wasn’t around for breakfast or dinner, and I started to think that he had either gotten completely lost and disoriented or perhaps had gone off somewhere to die. Scratchy was looking concerned all night, too, because off he went in search of his brother once again as I went to bed.
This morning, I got up and called for the cats, and I heard Itchy’s distinctive, familiar, somewhat annoying meow. He appeared by one of the bushes and walked right up to the stairs, something that he hasn’t done since he ran off. I walked slowly down the stairs, food in hand, and he waited for me to set it down by my feet and let me pet him while he ate. I was shocked. So was Scratchy, I think!
After he had had a few bites, and I had been petting him with him actually responding to my caresses, I picked him up and carried him upstairs to safety. Scratchy followed at a safe distance. When they were both inside, I put Itchy down and breathed a sigh of relief as they both descended on the food bowl.
Now I can actually give him his medicine. Maybe I’ll be able to help him out a little bit anyway.
Well, Itchy is still out and about in my garden. He made himself known late last night when I returned home from dinner. He was hungry, but he wouldn’t let me get close to him. I left some food out for him so he wouldn’t starve.
This morning, I tried to use food to get him to associate me with good things, and I tried again this evening. He’s gone seriously feral, and I now have to try to domesticate him again. Scratchy’s still looking out for him, but I think he’s starting to think his brother is a moron for not coming up the stairs and getting food in the house like normal (Itchy tried to climb the stairs but still does not have enough balance to even get up the first step).
Itchy won’t make a move towards the food or the water until Scratchy has investigated it. Also, Itchy has taken to following Scratchy around, which I think annoys Scratchy a little bit. Scratchy was feeling kind of frisky tonight and wanted to play with Itchy, so he tackled Itchy, who freaked out again, mostly because he’s still jumpy from all the falling down. I tried to tell Scratchy that wasn’t helping, but he stalked off in a snit because his brother was acting like a moron again, so I’m not sure how much he was actually listening to me.
All in all, though, Scratchy is on my side. He will come up to me in the middle of the garden while Itchy is watching and purr and rub up against me, as if to say, “See? She’s not so bad.” This is behavior that would have previously been unseemly for a macho cat like Scratchy.
The upshot of it is, I think this is going to take a lot of patience. I’m not going to leave food out again, because I want him to understand that if he wants food, he has to deal with me being there too. Sooner or later, he’ll get so hungry he won’t care. This evening he took about three or four bites of food before retreating to the bushes. But I’m not going to try touching him again until he gets REALLY comfortable with me being there.
I brought Itchy in to the vet on Thursday afternoon for a follow-up visit at the animal hospital (my regular vet was on vacation, and while he did call me to talk about the situation, there wasn’t much he could do over the phone) . The doctor was very nice, although she did admit that the problem with neurologic cats is that they’re incredibly difficult to diagnose.
She did check his ears, though, both of which have raging infections, so it may be that it’s as simple as treating the infection and maybe his sense of balance will be restored. She tested for FIV/FLV, which came out negative, and she reran the blood work (also still normal). If after the treatment for the ear infection is gone, she told me, we should test for toxoplasmosis, which is also treatable with antibiotics.
She’s also thinking that if it is none of the above, Itchy might have idiopathic vestibular disease, which is not a fatal problem, just disturbing, and nobody knows the cause of it, nor do they know a treatment for it. Sometimes it goes away on its own.
Of course, there’s always the chance that he received some sort of trauma to the head while he was out and there’s some sort of brain damage, and we could get an MRI and a CT scan, but that would involve going into Philly to the University of Penn, seeing a neurologist, putting him under general anesthesia, and shelling out a few thousand dollars for the specialist to tell us that they have no way of treating what he’s got. Can you guess that I’m hoping this all goes away on its own?
After the vet appointment, I brought him home and went out to get him some more kitty litter and a little kitty harness so we could go outside together. He has really wanted so badly to go out, ever since I brought him in, and since he hasn’t pooped, I figured he would be okay for me to take him out on a leash.
Boy was I wrong. He sat still for me to put the harness on him, but when we went outside and I sat him down, he raced for the bushes. When he felt the resistance from the leash, he FREAKED OUT. He was jumping up and down, doing acrobats, limbs flailing, claws out (he sliced my hand pretty deeply) , and he moved around so quickly and violently that the safety clips on the harness released, and he went running off into the night.
I am a terrible mommy. I should never have taken him out.
So now he is back outside. I saw him later that night, when he was under the bushes yowling like nobody’s business. I tried to go to him, but he wouldn’t let me near. I saw him again in the morning, when I brought some food out to him. He wouldn’t eat until I stepped far away from the food bowl. This afternoon after work, I tried to find him in his usual hiding places, but he wasn’t there.
The good thing is that Scratchy is just as concerned about Itchy as I am. The bad thing is that although Scratchy will be by my side while I’m in the garden, showing Itchy that I’m okay, he can’t pick up Itchy like I can, so he’s not really too much help right now. I went out again just now when I got home from rehearsal, and still no sign of Itchy. Scratchy has taken up his guard position at the bottom of the steps, on the lookout for his brother.
On the bright side, I’ve finally gotten a good night’s sleep. Also, I think the ear-cleaning has done something for his balance, because I was watching him outside, and although he’s still stumbling, he’s a little more confident in the way he is walking. Keep your fingers crossed that I will be able to charm him back inside tomorrow morning.
So I came home this afternoon, and Itchy had been asleep all day. I suppose that’s good, since then he hasn’t had to freak himself (and Scratchy) out stumbling all over the sunroom. When they gave him the subcutaneous fluid last night, it was all bubbled up in a hump over his left shoulder blade that made him look like a feline Quasimodo, but now in the light of day, much of the fluid has been absorbed by his body, and what’s left of the fluid has obeyed the law of gravity and has kind of pooled into a pocket around his armpit (well, it would be his armpit if he was a human…you know what I mean).
Oddly enough, he hasn’t used the litterbox yet, which concerns me, since there’s no way he couldn’t have the urge to urinate after being injected with that much fluid. But again, he’s been asleep most of the night (and day), and maybe getting to the litterbox is too much of a hassle for him right now…he’ll get to it when the urge is too strong to overcome.
When I woke Itchy up, he meowed sleepily and tried to get up but fell down again, which to me means either A) whatever fluid he got hasn’t done the job because it hasn’t been eliminated from his body yet, or B) this might be permanent brain damage. I called my vet’s office, only to find out that he’s on vacation. He’ll be in tomorrow morning and in the evening, the receptionist said, and then everybody is off both Friday and Monday for Labor Day weekend. So I left a message and am hoping Itchy pees all the toxins out really soon, so that when my vet calls me back, I can say, “Never mind. He’s all better now.”
The only funny thing about all of this is how comical Itchy looks when he’s trying to walk. Ray thinks it looks like he’s drunk. I think it looks like he’s got cerebral palsy. Either way, it’s very, very sad, but funny. But sad. But funny. But sad. I hope he gets better soon.
My cat, Itchy, is the adventurous one of my two cats. Where Scratchy usually doesn’t go very much farther than the borders of our backyard, Itchy roams far and wide. My immediate neighbors at least know who both of them are and that they belong to me, so I feel relatively safe letting them wander around unsupervised.
Every once in a while, usually after I’ve gone out of town for a few nights, Itchy will get into a snit and decide not to come home for several days. This used to concern me greatly, especially the one time when he was gone for over a week. But now I’ve figured out his pattern: he stays away for a few (no more than 2 or 3) days to punish me, and then when he gets hungry enough, he comes back.
This time, he was gone for 4 days and I was starting to become slightly alarmed. I had seen him on Friday afternoon, and then I spent the night at my friend Amy’s in NY and came back on Saturday around lunchtime, and I saw neither hide nor hair of him until late Monday afternoon, when I went out into the garden to pick some tomatoes. I actually didn’t see him hiding amongst the plants by the pond until he started to move, and I thought he was going to come towards me, but he didn’t; he scrambled off underneath the shed, where he knows I can’t get him.
When he was scrambling away, it looked like his foot was getting caught in something in the bushes, because he was not as graceful as he normally is. I shrugged it off, happy to know he was nearby, and hoping that he would show up for dinner that night.
He did not. Scratchy showed up, and while he was outside, it looked like he was keeping watch out for Itchy, but Itchy never showed up.
On Tuesday night (last night) at about 9:30 PM, I saw Scratchy waiting on the stairs for Itchy again. Scratchy had been in and out all night, so I knew he wasn’t hungry. I opened the door and called for them. Scratchy came up the stairs, and Itchy poked his head out from under the stairs. But he had a really hard time climbing the stairs, since he was walking as if he had caught his foot in something again. Sort of half limping, half falling, I took pity on him and brought a little bit of food down to him to calm him down, and he let me pet him (which is unusual for both of them when they’re outside; it’s like they’re too cool for Mom to pet them in front of their friends).
He ate the food like he was famished, and I carried him upstairs to the sunroom/cat room, where Scratchy followed like the concerned brother he is. Once they were safely inside, I watched Itchy walk some more and saw that there was definitely something wrong with one of his forelegs. It looked like the left one, as if every time he put weight on it, it would collapse. And it was freaking him out, I could tell that.
I gave him some more food (of course he must have been ravenous if he hadn’t eaten in 4 days!) and I called Ray upstairs to show him what was going on. I decided to call my vet’s emergency line, because if it was a break or a sprain or a dislocation or who knows what, someone should probably look at him as soon as possible. But the vet’s emergency number said, “If you want to page the doctor, leave a message and the doctor will call you right back. If it is between the hours of 10 PM and 8 AM, call the animal emergency room.”
I looked at my clock: 10:10 PM. Damn. I wrote down the number of the emergency room and went back downstairs to discuss our options with Ray. My concern was that if we kept him inside all night, he would meow the entire night, especially if he’s scared or in pain. If I took him to the emergency room, it would cost more, but they might be able to give him something to calm him down. Ray had lots of leather work to do, so he wasn’t keen on going to the ER.
Still, I thought it was important to go, so Ray helped me get Itchy into his carrier (which Itchy was not happy with; he ruined a perfectly good shirt trying to climb out of my arms), and I drove Itchy to the hospital while Ray stayed home to do leather work.
At the animal ER, they gave me a bunch of paperwork to fill out and called a nurse out for triage. As they took Itchy away, I sat down and watched a sappy Disney film they were playing on the TV in the lobby. From what I could tell, it was about some boy and his dog (no, not Old Yeller or Lassie): the dog could play basketball, and the boy’s mom was played by Susan Sarandon. I thought, “Susan, what are you doing in a movie like this? Do you need money that badly?”
While I was half-watching the movie, I saw a nurse carry a huge dog into one of the exam rooms where a man and woman were waiting. About five minutes later, the couple left the exam room sobbing, but thanking the doctor profusely. It reminded me of when I had to put down my beloved cat Midnight in college. He was 15, so he’d had a good life, but he was suffering from intestinal cancer and had to be put to sleep. I started crying for that couple and for Midnight and for what might be happening to Itchy. I was on the verge of crying because of the movie, but it was so sappy it actually made me want to laugh.
A nurse called my name and brought me into an exam room. She told me that they think the problem might be neurological because of the way Itchy is moving his head in a very stilted manner. She had him walk around for a while and pointed out different mannerisms. The doctor came in and told me the same thing: that they didn’t find any wounds or broken bones, no sprains or dislocations, and that they were very sure this was a neurological issue.
Something, anything could have happened while he was outside, but the most likely thing is that he ate something that affected his brain. They ran blood tests on him and said that his liver and kidney were functioning normally, which was a good sign. The doctor gave him subcutaneous liquids which would hopefully flush out his system and get the bad stuff out of his brain, but gave me no guarantee that it would work. I now have to keep him inside (which is pissing him off) and watch his behavior. If it doesn’t get better, I have to bring him to my regular vet.
Keep your fingers crossed that the fluids he got last night are doing the job. I don’t want to have to put him back in the carrier again.
As I grew up, he was my best friend. He comforted me through convalescence after a broken collarbone, a dislocated knee, and numerous sprained ankles. He loved watching me garden, and did his best to kill any bugs, newts, or birds that got in my way. His favorite napping spots were the porch, the laundry basket, and the roof (which he reached by climbing the plum tree that grew next to our house). He was incredibly intelligent, and learned how to open the sliding glass door for himself to let himself out.