Category: Cats

I wondered why Velcro wasn't on her usual kitchen counter perch begging for food when I woke up this morning. I went upstairs to check my e-mail, read some blog feeds and play with Trillian and Dr. Jones until it was time to shower and get ready for my volunteer shift taking care of the adoptable cats at Petco.

As I was crossing through the kitchen, I heard Velcro meow from the living room. She was lying on the floor on a flattened shopping bag, which is unusual for her because she prefers the furniture. I picked her up gently and noticed that her fur felt moist. When I tried to stand her on her feet, her back legs collapsed beneath her.  She lay down, tucked herself into a tidy, upright position and looked up at me as if to ask what I was going to do to fix all this.

Well, so much for taking a shower. I threw on a random assortment of garments, put Velcro in a cat carrier that was still in the kitchen from Xena's routine vet visit a couple of days before, and took her to the emergency vet clinic conveniently located less than a mile away.

Velcro is almost 18. She's a breast cancer survivor and over the past year or so she's gotten terribly skinny and her fur is clumpy and unkempt. She's completely deaf and her ears seem to bother her. Every time I walk by and see her sleeping, I stop to watch and make sure she's breathing because although she seems happy and energetic most of the time, I can't help but worry.

As I made my way to the vet, I was hoping against hope that today wouldn't be Velcro's last day with us.

When I walked in the door to the clinic, two vet techs swooped in immediately and took the carrier to the exam room while I filled out paperwork.

While I waited, I came to regret not having had breakfast or coffee earlier, so I ended up buying a Pop Tart from the vending machine.

Finally, the doctor called me in to talk about Velcro's condition. She didn't seem to have anything wrong with her back or hips, so she probably hadn't had a fall. She was dehydrated, so they were going to give her I.V. fluids and keep her overnight. They wanted to run blood tests to check her kidney and thyroid function. I'd just had those tests done sometime before Christmas, but apparently an elderly cat can undergo drastic changes fairly quickly.

The office staff showed me the estimate for services and asked if I were willing to pay 75% up front. Well, of course. That's what credit cards are for, right? I couldn't help thinking that if Velcro could have waited until Monday, I'd probably be paying about half that amount at my own vet, but what can you do?

I paid a visit to Velcro before I left and she seemed as happy to see me as always. The vet tech said she wouldn't stop purring during her examination, which is typical. Of course, cats purr when they're upset, so that's not necessarily as positive a sign as it might appear.

Now I'm just waiting to hear if the blood tests reveal anything actionable. The vet said that the I.V. fluids alone might very well perk her up. Let's hope so.

This is the hard part of being a pet owner, but I'm trying to stay hopeful. Velcro's a tough little thing and I'm betting on her to pull through once again.

Early Evening Update: Vet called and said Velcro's electrolyte balance was way off (potassium very low), so now that she's had fluids she's "climbing the bars of her cage." Yay! Also her blood sugar was quite low. They're still waiting on further blood test results, so no hard conclusions yet, but it's nice to know she seems better. I may go visit her this evening, weather permitting.

In case you're wondering how Trillian and Dr. Jones are getting along:

Say it with me: "Awwwww!!!"

Dr. Jones has gained an ounce of weight per day since he arrived. I think we're going to need to get them a bigger bed.

Meet Dr. Jones. Well sure, his name is really Indiana Jones, but I find that it's much funnier to call a 2-pound, 13-ounce kitten Dr. Jones.

So now we have five cats, or as I like to think of it, three cats and two cats. After all, the two tribes never cross paths because three of them live in the main part of the house and the other two live in the recording studio.

We got the kitten because Trillian seemed lonely. Whenever we spent too much time downstairs, she would duck under the blinds in the studio's bay window and stare longingly across at us in the kitchen. That's just plain sad.

My friend, me, had a litter of kittens available and I'd already identified the brown tabby as my favorite. The weather had been preventing me from going to pick him up, so she brought him over on Saturday morning. I had a vet appointment scheduled already, so I got him checked out, vaccinated and tested for FIV within two hours of his arrival.

The first day, Trillian was having none of it and she did a lot of hissing and growling. When we weren't around to watch them, we kept the kitten in a wire kennel, which he trashed like a rock star's hotel room. Have I mentioned that Dr. Jones is talkative? My husband said he squalled so much the first night that he almost lost his voice.

The next day, a switch flipped for Trillian and she finally realized that she now had the world's most awesome toy at her disposal. They spent the entire day running around and chasing each other. Trillian wasn't ready to give the humans credit yet, though. She was rather standoffish to us and refused to play her usual fetch games.

Today is the fourth day and everything has settled down. The two cats are still playing up a storm, Trillian has warmed back up to us and Dr. Jones isn't making quite so much noise anymore. I haven't seen the two cats cuddling yet, but I imagine it's only a matter of time.

Dr. Jones is a friendly little thing, constantly getting on laps, climbing up backs and playing with hair. I have to be careful when he's sitting on me because he has a tendency to launch himself at my face unexpectedly. It's been a long time since I had a kitten this young and I'd forgotten how exuberant they can be.

So mock me if you will, but it's nice to have all the cats happy and content in their own little sections of the household. I think we're all going to benefit from our association with the intrepid Dr. Jones.

We've come to the last caturday of NaBloPoMo and the final cat in our household, Trillian. We've had her for just over a year and it's hard to imagine now what our lives were like without her.

If you're wondering why she's missing the tip of one ear, it's because she was originally a feral kitten, but a rescue group decided to adopt her out rather than returning her to the streets after she was spayed. Feral cats are routinely "ear-tipped" to indicate that they've already been spayed or neutered.

Trillian lives in my husband's recording studio/my office because Xena was so jealous of her that we feared for her safety. She's much bigger now, but Xena is still a behemoth in comparison and it seems best to let her stay where she's comfortable and happy.

She really does love the studio. Every mixing console has a cover over it because she is way too interested in playing with the faders, particularly when they move automatically. She's not afraid of loud noises; in fact, she'll often lie on the control desk during a recording session or band practice. If she gets too intrusive, my husband will shut her in my office (where her food, water and cat box are) until he's finished working.

The office and studio are filled with exciting cat experiences. If I'm ever wondering where Trillian is, all I have to do is insert or eject a CD into a computer or print something and she'll come running to watch.

Trillian is not quite two years old, so she's still very playful. Her favorite toy is a black shoelace or drawstring that she found somewhere in the studio. We call it her string and she loves to bat at it or chase it and bring it back. Toy mousies are also a popular choice, but she seems to lose them often.

She has the odd, raccoon-like habit of placing her toys in her water bowl. We've never figured out why she does this, but lately I've been rescuing her drowned string several times a week.

One of the nice things about Trillian is that she's pretty much up for anything. We took her on a road trip to Nashville last spring and I could see us traveling with her again. 

Our only concern about having Trillian live in a separate part of the house from the other cats is that she might be lonely without another cat to play
with. If we ever end up with another kitten, it will be to keep her company. She seems okay as long as we make a point of spending time with her as often as we can, though.

I'd write more, but Trillian just jumped up on the desk for a cuddle and how can I deny her?

Velvet doesn't have a cool name like the rest of our cats because we foolishly thought she might be accustomed to her shelter name when we got her. I think she knows it now, but we missed our chance to change it when we brought her home a couple of years ago.

She's our "middle cat" downstairs – the buffer between young Xena and elderly Velcro. Our vet thinks she's about 8 or 9 years old and she's obviously had a hard life, but she seems to be enjoying living with us.

When we adopted her, we were told that she had belonged to a family that decided they didn't want a cat anymore once they got a dog. So they just stopped letting her into their house and she wandered the neighborhood forlornly, scavenging food wherever she could and picking up a host of parasites and scars. Finally a sympathetic neighbor took her to the shelter, where she remained for more than seven months before we came along.

Now she lives a life of leisure and pampering like the rest of our cats. She and Xena have a blast chasing each other all over the house and although they never cuddle, I've seen them nuzzle from time to time.

When Velvet first came home with us, she was not a fan of being picked up or held for any length of time, but she's gotten more amenable to all kinds of attention since then. Now she'll regularly sit on my lap or follow me around asking for attention.

The negative attention she gets comes from her dogged attempts to steal Velcro's canned food. I have to guard Velcro whenever she's eating lest Velvet sneak in and push her aside. Given Velvet's background, I don't blame her for wanting to make sure she gets whatever food she can, but it's a little annoying to have to be the cat food police twice a day.

She only has one nickname, "Velveeta," but we use her actual name most of the time. It's already confusing enough to have two cats whose names begin with "Vel-".

Velvet is a sweet girl and I'm so glad we're able to give her life's story a happily ever after.

I'm listing the cats in the order in which they came to live with us, not by age, so next on the roster is Xena. We originally got her from my sister. Here's that story.

Xena and I have a complicated relationship because she is passionately in love with my husband and would be perfectly happy to have him all to herself. I'll admit that I could be more respectful of my kitteh co-wife. It's probably not nice of me to constantly refer to her as "wide load."

But she's a big girl. Big and glossy and squishy. She is evidently incapable of walking past the food bowl without stopping to eat, even if she happens to walk by a hundred times a day. We free-feed all the cats, so switching to light food just made the skinny ones skinnier and she still looks like ten pounds of mud in a five-pound bag.

 She can be very sweet, though, even to me. She loves to leap into my husband's arms and have him carry her around. If he's not available, she'll occasionally launch herself at me instead. It's very important to pay careful attention to her body language at all times because it's not a good surprise when sixteen pounds of cat comes flying through the air at you if you're not prepared.

Xena has a strong personality. When we had her spayed, she had to wear the Elizabethan collar for an entire month because she was so incredibly determined to chew at her stitches. I didn't go along on the vet visit when she had the stitches removed, but my husband reported that the procedure was a Herculean task and that the vet said that Xena was the worst patient he'd ever dealt with in his entire career.

 Her jealousy isn't limited just to me. She gets along okay with our older cats, Velcro and Velvet, but when I brought a fourth cat into the household, that was where she drew the line. I tried for months to incorporate Trillian into our cat population, but Xena wasn't having it. She harassed the poor kitten mercilessly until we finally had to give up and let Trillian live in the recording studio by herself.

One last little factoid: we almost never call her Xena. Thanks to too much "Name Game" early in her life ("Xena, Xena, bo-beena…"), we now mostly refer to her as "Beans" or "Beanza." So she doesn't even get to own her cool, warrior princess name. No wonder she can be so cranky.

Since there are four caturdays this month and I have four cats, naturally I decided to feature one per week during NaBloPoMo.

Today we'll talk about the grande dame of the household, Velcro.

She came into my family in the early 1990s when my mom's boyfriend found her tied into a pillowcase and left in a Salvation Army donation bin. She was just a kitten then, but she quickly became my mother's favorite cat. In fact, when my mom was hospitalized after being diagnosed with lung cancer, her boyfriend smuggled Velcro into the room to visit at least once that I know of.

Velcro was a very feisty young cat who HATED children. My cousin Travis referred to her as "the velociraptor" because of the way she'd stalk and attack him every time he came over. (Travis just turned 25, which gives you an idea of how old Velcro is now.)

When my mom died in 1998, Velcro came to live with me and my husband and the two cats we had at the time, Kato and Friday.

For years, Velcro was very bite-y. She was one of those cats who loved attention (hence the name), but she would only accept being petted for so long before suddenly nipping at you. Her teeth are really sharp and it hurt, but she never broke the skin.

Her dislike of children lasted through the first few years of my niece's life, but she's mellowed considerably and has rarely nipped at my nephew at all. She's also stopped biting us, which is nice.

Velcro had a mastectomy several years ago, but bounced back nicely. In the past year or so she's gone deaf and now she's getting awfully skinny and her coat is pretty ratty. Still, she can vault onto a countertop with ease and she never lets me forget that she gets canned food twice a day, WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? Because she can't hear, her reminders have gotten extremely loud.

After all this time, her name still fits her very well. She loves to sit on my lap, shed copious quantities of white hair all over my black clothes and purr contentedly. I don't know how much longer we'll have her around, but I'm doing all I can to make sure she enjoys her life with us.

Urlesque.com has declared today A Day Without Cats on the 'net. You know I can't let that stand.

You can see all of my many cat photos within the Jean Teasdale Collection on my Flickr account. You're welcome, cat fans.