Oh, great. \u00c2\u00a0A blog about your cat, you say. \u00c2\u00a0How trite. \u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0Well I don’t care, and you don’t have to read it.<\/p>\n
My 19 year-old, toothless, deaf and wobbly cat, a dear friend, started complaining the other week. \u00c2\u00a0I knew he wasn’t feeling well and probably expected me to do something about it. \u00c2\u00a0As it was the weekend, I couldn’t take him to the vets, and on Sunday night he wandered off.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0He’s not one to go more than a few yards from the house, as he prefers blankets and warm spots. \u00c2\u00a0But by the next day he hadn’t come back, and we were worried for him. \u00c2\u00a0We have racoons around, so I was afraid that they had hurt him. We called around to the vets in the area and to the SPCA, etc. \u00c2\u00a0Late the next day we heard from a vet \u00c2\u00a0— someone had brought in a cat matching our description. \u00c2\u00a0The person was contacted and, long story short, it was indeed our cat. \u00c2\u00a0They were taking very good care of him. \u00c2\u00a0Apparently he was out in the (major) road nearby, confused, \u00c2\u00a0and someone picked him up and he found his way to this very kind person who took care of him.<\/p>\n
This cat found me when he was a kitten, maybe 3-4 months old. \u00c2\u00a0I lived in a little shack of a house, and we already had 2 cats, plus lots more in the neighborhood. \u00c2\u00a0This little scrapy grey stray kept climbing in the kitchen window, no matter how hard i tried to keep him out. \u00c2\u00a0He’d climb in, plop down on top of the cat food, and frantically start gobbling up what was there. \u00c2\u00a0 I’d toss him out and he’d be back before I could turn around. \u00c2\u00a0Eventually he got through to me, and we accepted him into our house. That was 19 years ago.<\/p>\n
For a while, a year or two, he lived with a friend, but she was moving and so he came to live with me again, in an apartment where we weren’t supposed to have cats. \u00c2\u00a0He’s such a smart guy – he has a bit of siamese in him.<\/p>\n
About 6 or 7 years ago, he started acting strangely, and within a few hours had completely lost his sense of balance. \u00c2\u00a0We thought he was a goner. \u00c2\u00a0He became small and couldn’t stand, and apparently had gone deaf. \u00c2\u00a0 We took him up to an animal neurologist, who could see something had happened in his brain but apparently it wasn’t a stroke. \u00c2\u00a0We gave him lots of B vitamins, and he slowly started to make a comeback. \u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0To this day, he’s all but deaf, and his balance is really bad. \u00c2\u00a0He kind of wobbles around, especially when he tries to look up and to the side. \u00c2\u00a0 His teeth got really bad and had to be removed, so now he’s toothless. \u00c2\u00a0He doesn’t clean himself anymore. He often forgoes using the litterbox, and when he does, he misses. \u00c2\u00a0 But he’s a sweet old character, and we love him, and we’re glad he’s home. \u00c2\u00a0I don’t think he’ll be around much longer.<\/p>\n
Why care so much about a cat? \u00c2\u00a0Well, he’s a living, sentient being, just like me. \u00c2\u00a0He hurts, he has desires, he has good days and bad days. \u00c2\u00a0He gets excited, anxious, hungry, and lonely. \u00c2\u00a0He’s taught me many things, by his example. \u00c2\u00a0His fearlessness, his courage and perserverance, his affection, his kooky personality, his love for life, for food. \u00c2\u00a0His curiosity and cleverness. \u00c2\u00a0How he’s handled aging and the changes in his life (not that he’s had much choice, but he’s borne it with grace). \u00c2\u00a0His dignity, even though his health is failing and he can’t keep it together. \u00c2\u00a0He still comes and finds me when I’m sitting down and says, OK it’s my turn to sit on your warm lap and that’s what I’m gonna do, even if you don’t like it. \u00c2\u00a0 All things expressed very purely and without words by this cat, my old friend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Oh, great. \u00c2\u00a0A blog about your cat, you say. \u00c2\u00a0How trite. \u00c2\u00a0 \u00c2\u00a0Well I don’t care, and you don’t have to read it. My 19 year-old, toothless, deaf and wobbly cat, a dear friend, started complaining the other week. \u00c2\u00a0I knew he wasn’t feeling well and probably expected me to do something about it. \u00c2\u00a0As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[22,23,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.alienoverlord.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.alienoverlord.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.alienoverlord.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alienoverlord.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alienoverlord.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alienoverlord.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alienoverlord.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions\/35"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.alienoverlord.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alienoverlord.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.alienoverlord.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}