Top Eleven: Things I Blogged About In 2014

Another year of writing, complaining, and commending down, hopefully many more to go.

Each year I've done this blog (read: last year) I've done a year end "wrap-up" where I scour through my archives and attempt to locate the eleven articles that mean the most to me.  Maybe they're connected to an important memory, maybe they were extremely emotional to write, or maybe I just had fun writing them.

And yes, there will also be a "bottom eleven" coming as well.

But for now, let's look back at the articles I'm the most proud of from the past year.

Yami

Every now and again, something comes into your life you're completely unprepared for.  A sudden twist of fate, a chance meeting, or just a case of "right place, right/wrong time."  Such was the case some years ago when my parents brought home two cats.   One was named Haiku, and the other we renamed to Yami (because the original name was rather dumb).

When they were picked up from the shelter, the cats were described to my parents this way:

"(Yami) is going to be very friendly, very social.  Haiku might be pretty aloof."

They were wrong on every count.  Haiku was the most "people" cat I ever saw, bringing toys to people in the middle of the night, curling up on any lap she could find her way on to, and refusing to be more than ten feet away from someone if she could help it.

Yami...spent most of his time hiding.

Or perched on things like a guy leaning on a table.

Perhaps it was because my family also had a dog.  Perhaps it was because, as we later figured out, Haiku was bullying him as the two got older.  Either way, Yami was primarily my sister's cat, because he liked to go upstairs and hide in her room or down in the basement.  Rarely did he ever socialize with anybody else.

We were convinced that Yami was essentially anti-social.

He also had a distinctive limp, which we could only figure must have happened when he was a tiny kitten.  The two were found near a road, so we suspected either an animal attack or he was struck (ever so slightly) by a car.

This came into effect one Christmas Eve when he managed to sneak outside and climb up a tree.  Because of his bad back leg, he wasn't able to climb back down, and the tree he climbed was essentially dead, too dangerous to climb up after.  However, it was near another, larger, healthier tree.  That night I scaled up the tree in the cold rain (did I mention it was raining?) with a long board and some food.  I placed the board on the branch I was on and set it firmly on the branch Yami was huddled on.  I tried to coax him over, but he didn't budge.  I placed the food on the board, and climbed back down.

The next morning, with a backpack and some rope, I scaled the tree again.  Yami had managed to walk across the board and was now huddled on the "good" side.  I loaded the shivering, soaked cat into the backpack, tied the rope around it, and lowered him down to the rest of the family.  They took him out and carried him inside, where he immediately struggled, broke free from their grasp, and took off for the cat box.

It sounds like a joke, but it's what happened.

However, as the years went on, we noticed a few other things about Yami as he got more used to the house.  He would chase shadows of things you held out to try to play with him.  If you simply wiggled your fingers so the shadows moved, he'd tackle them and chase them around.  He would sometimes come over to you if you had your hand lowered so you could scratch him.  He stopped running away the moment you entered the room.

When Haiku passed away this last February, there was almost a complete personality shift in Yami.

He would suddenly come into the room and meow for attention.  He would purr more often when you pet him.  He started chasing toys and bringing them back to you so you'd play with him.  He'd curl up on a bed to sleep against people.  As time went on, it more and more became my bed he would curl up on, and I'd wake up to find him either curled up between my shins or pressed against the side of my leg.  I used to hook one leg a little bit just to give him somewhere to curl up in.

When I moved to my current living place, it was decided that Yami would come with me.  The two of us had grown pretty attached to each other, and since my parents still had the dog, it would be good for him to have "his own" place that he would let me also live in.

And for a while, things were great.  We'd play with toys, he'd curl up on the bed with me, he'd come out for attention if I was sitting watching television.

Several weeks ago, my parents were out of town for a few weeks, and I was house sitting for them.  I brought Yami back and some other things to keep me busy.  Yami started to develop a runny nose, which wasn't terribly uncommon for him when he was younger.  He used to need antibiotics every now and again to treat sinus infections (his mother was notorious for constantly having sinus problems, being a Persian.)

He was also thinner, but still eating the same amount and using the cat box, so I didn't think too much about it, and arranged with my parents for us to take him to the vet after they got back.

That day, I received a phone call and a text message asking me to call my parents back.  Yami was very sick.  His right eye was bulged out slightly, and his nose was still running.  He had lost a significant amount of weight, and was severely dehydrated.  We were told there were two likely possibilities.

One was an abscessed tooth caused an infection that traveled up the sinus and was resting behind his eye.  The other was cancer causing a tumor that was applying pressure.

Needless to say, we were extremely concerned.  If it was something that could be treated to get him healthy again, that's great, but if it was cancer, we had to seriously start considering what his life was going to be like from that point on and if we should put him through that kind of experience.

We started a round of antibiotics.

Yami didn't improve.  He would walk around crying, seemingly lost.  He wouldn't jump up on furniture any more.  He started slipping while climbing up and down short broad steps between rooms of my parents house.  He would need to be lead in to eat, and then would just leave a short distance away and curl up.

Today I received a text message asking me to call my mother.  She had carried Yami to his food several times already today, and then watched him go into the family room, circle the room while crying, and then move to the middle of the room and use it like a bathroom.  He hasn't used his cat box since Sunday.  Something is obviously very wrong with my cat.

"I don't know what you think I'm up to, but I promise you I'm not."

I'm heading out to the vet now.  We've decided that leaving Yami in the state he's in, when we aren't able to afford the extensive amount of medical care it would take just to keep him as he currently is (which, obviously, is pretty miserable), would just be cruel.  I'm going to say goodbye to my cat.  I know he won't understand me if I manage to say it, but he was so much more than we expected, and we felt so bad that he wasn't able to be the cat he could've been until so much later in life.

However, that cat he was before and what he became were pretty amazing, and I'll never regret having had him in my life.  He was instrumental in my feeling like I was settled in to my apartment.  My apartment is going to be so empty without him.

Our Cat Haiku Part Two

Today we had to put down Haiku.

After a long conversation with the vet, it was concluded that it wasn't going to be a matter of finances or whether we couldn't do a lot more for her, it was a matter of her quality of life after any more tests and procedures were performed.

So, today, I'm going to share a few more things about this cat that made her special.  Yes, it's completely self-indulgent, but then again, it's a blog, and that's nothing if not self-indulgent.

Our Cat Haiku

Way, way, back in the infancy of this blog, I posted the following picture.

This is Haiku, a ten year old cat our family took in when she was about two from a shelter.  She came as part of a package deal, her son Yami (a black cat four pounds heavier than his mother) came along for the ride.

We were told that Yami was going to be friendly and social, and that Haiku might be a bit distant and weird.

A shelter has never been more wrong.

Haiku is, by far, the friendliest animal my family has ever owned.  She will jump into the lap of anybody and curl up, or sleep on their chest while they're in bed.  She will slowly scoot herself forward to rub against their face, and for many years would even wrap around the top of their head on their pillow just to be near "her people."  She will purr at the drop of a hat, and if she sees you lower your hand down and make a "scratching" motion from two rooms away, she'll prance and trot right over to you so you can pay attention to her.

Yami, on the other hand, needed five years to get comfortable around me to want to sleep on my bed when I'm still in it.  He'll still run away if you approach him too quickly, regardless of who you are.

She also has constant sinus problems, sometimes simply major congestion, sometimes she'd get infections and need an antibiotic.  A few times she needed steroids to help her through her infections and cols.  There was a rather serious incident where her soft palette completely sealed itself up, requiring surgery.  She wasn't able to eat (she'd take in air while eating and just throw all of her food back up), and could barely move.  She wound up down to four pounds before her surgery.  She's now back up to a (slightly more than healthy) seven point two pounds.

This problem, even after her surgery, left Haiku with a signature snort/snuffle every time she breathed.  At least, every time she moved around while breathing.  If she was asleep, she'd have no problems and would occasionally just have a little wheeze as she snored, but most of the time she was silent.

However, it wasn't easy to have the vet look at her.  Haiku loves to ride around in the car, and likes to hang out at the vet, but hates having any tests done.  Early in our time with her, a technician picked up Haiku to take a quick blood sample from her.  My father, who was there at the time, advised she might want help.  She gave him the most "you must be kidding" expression and said, "Sir, we do this for a living, I can handle this."

Two minutes later the tech was back in the room with blood all over her arm putting Haiku down, at which point she said "I think I'm going to need to get some help."

I am convinced she believes she is a dog (alternatively, that all dogs are actually just big cats).  Her best friend in the world is my parents' goldendoodle Pinot.  Our neighbors had two dogs, a black lab and a golden lab, both trained for hunting.  They would regularly visit our house because they know cookies reside here, and at one point Haiku sneaked out the door when they were visiting.  Immediately the golden lab, spotting something small and furry, dashed over to her and ... started sniffing.  Haiku sniffed the golden lab back.  Then Haiku rubbed against the dog.  The dog started licking Haiku's face, which drove Haiku nuts and made her want to go back inside, but from that point on any time the dog saw our cat, its tail would wag and it would want to shower Haiku with affection.

Needless to say, this surprised and bothered our neighbor that his great hunting dogs were turning out to be real softies that just wanted to make friends.

Haiku has proven herself to be a true survivor.  She has managed to escape to the outdoors without anybody seeing her twice and promptly got lost.  This, we've been told, was because her sinus problems prevented her from being able to smell her way home.  

In a lot of suburbs, this might not be as much of a problem, but it's rather wooded where I live, and it's not uncommon to find out there's a fisher, raccoons, foxes, owls, and even the occasional black bear lumbering around.

Once she was only gone for a day when the weather was still warm, causing me to miss work to search the neighborhood for her, until a group of the neighborhood kids (and a small dog accompanying them) discovered her under a stump two houses away.  This was the day I decided I seriously didn't like one of our neighbors, since I was handing out fliers with her picture, and his reaction after looking was to look me square in the eye and say, "Well, she's probably dead."

Jerk.

The second time was a bit more severe, because it was winter.  There wasn't much snow on the ground, but temperatures were extremely low.  I was watching the house for my parents who were out of state, meaning I was also keeping an eye on my sister (who is Deaf and has high-functioning autism).  I spent hours that night searching the woods for her, without any sign of her.  I didn't get a wink of sleep that night, and the next day was out again searching high and low around the street for her.  As time went on, I was convinced she either froze or was taken by an animal.

Again, that night I had no sleep as I couldn't stop picturing all the horrible ways the family's cat had died under my watch.  I barely ate anything all day and was doing my best to stay strong for my sister, who was getting particularly upset.

The next morning, around seven thirty, the phone rang.  I answered it groggily, and someone said "hey, I think your cat's under our car."  My heart immediately sank because I figured a neighbor hit her.

After a moment of silence, the voice said "Um, do you want to come get her?  She won't come out for me, I think it's because my dog is barking at her."

I don't even really remember getting dressed, I was just out the door, in my car, and driving down to the neighbor's house (five houses away, across the street) and crouching under their car.  Haiku trotted right out and immediately wanted to be held.  She was cold, wet, miserable, but happy to be found by her people again.

Last night, Haiku was walking in a hallway when we suddenly heard her screech in pain.  I moved to investigate, and I tried to pick her up, which made her screech again and she bolted towards a cardboard box she liked to curl up in.  I managed to gingerly scoop her up without causing her any pain, and set her on a family member's lap where she stayed calm until someone tried to shift her, then she would cry out in pain again.

I spent several hours last night with my father at the emergency vet having her looked at.  They couldn't find anything wrong, and believed that it could be a pulled muscle or a cramp.  They gave us some pain medication and sent us on our way.  Haiku spent all night in her carrier box on the floor near her food.

This morning, I tried to draw her out of her carrier in case she felt better, and was greeted with more cries of pain.  Something was seriously wrong.

We took her back to the emergency vet, and after a few x-rays, there was no clear answer to what was causing her pain.  She was rather seriously blocked up, intestine-wise, so we had the vet perform a couple of enemas to flush her out (under sedation, of course).

We got her back home tonight, but the pain still seems to be there.  We can pick her up, and she can walk a little bit, but too much walking (more than a couple of steps) and she's crying out again.  We called the vet back to find out if this might just be residual pain or if we needed to bring her back in.  

Here's the breakdown of the conversation.

The emergency vet said that they didn't see anything on the x-ray to indicate any skeletal problems, and all of her internal organs appear to be fine.  

At this point, the next step would be a CT scan to try to figure out if it's a muscular or nerve issue, such as something getting pinched.  It's also possible there's a hairline fracture causing her problems.

There's also one other possibility, something that a recent dog that visited their hospital had:  a cancerous tumor on her spine.  

At this point, we don't know what's wrong.  The vet recommended we call our regular vet tomorrow to see if she has any ideas.  Obviously a CT scan is expensive, and we really hope there's nothing seriously wrong with our cat, but right now we have to seriously look at some options, including "what would her quality of life be if she needed surgery?"  "Does the cost justify how much work it would take to make her healthy, and even then, how healthy would she be?"

I think right now my major problem is that we just don't know what's wrong.  I don't know enough about pet biology to even start to guess what's happening.  If it's a nerve issue, can it be resolved without surgery?  If it's a tumor, what are the odds she'd be without any pain after removal?  If it's a fracture, what would be involved in helping the bone heal?  And again, what are the odds of each one?  

I really hope I don't come across as stingy, but while I love our cat dearly, I know that spending several thousand dollars just to determine the humane thing to do is have her put to sleep is... I'm not sure what the word is.  I just don't want us to throw money at a problem that can't be fixed, especially if it just means she spends more days in pain before we're left with only that choice.

On the other hand, I don't want us to make that drastic decision just to find out later it was a broken toe that the vet missed and she just needed her foot wrapped for a few months.  Or that it was still a constipation issue, and we just needed a bit more laxative to get it out and solved.

So right now I'm barely holding it together as I type this, because writing manages to engage my brain and let me put off having to deal with emotions keep my focus together instead of dwelling on what's still unknown.  My whole family has a long night ahead of us, and only tomorrow will (possibly) give us any more answers.