Tuesday Catblogging

This is Cypress. Cypress hates you. Don't take it personally; Cypress hates everyone. Cypress marginally accepts my right to exist, most of the time anyway. Beyond that, she hates everyone, regardless of species or personality or generosity in their dealings with her.

Cypress is fourteen or fifteen years old, I'm lousy with dates, and has spent nearly all of it scheming to open cans of cat food. She almost had the can opener sorted out, I'm convinced another year would have had it, when they started putting pop-tops on the cans, and now she's back to square one, a little older, a little wiser, a little more pissed off at an often capricious humanity in general. But if she could figure out the pop-tops and how to extract ice cubes from the freezer, she'd quite contentedly do away with every moving thing on the planet bigger than a toad. This includes me, and I do not take offense. She's entitled to her fantasies; so are we all.

There's no particularly good reason the cat lives her entire life at a point just below the Rage Threshold, that I can see anyway. There's the usual stuff: vets, tooth-brushing, fur-combing, vacuum cleaners, and the presence of the Emergency Backup Cat Iala, but on the whole Iala contends with all of this with unfailing good nature so I'm inclined to assume Cypress is just neurotic. Some people are, after all.

This isn't something I take personally and I encourage you not to either. She's an extremely beautiful cat, and she's good at spotting when I really need her to purr at me or smack me in the face with her tail. If she could tolerate you, I'm sure she'd extend the same empathy.

Today, though, Cypress hates my guts, even more than normal which again is a considerable amount. Yesterday morning, she and Iala seemed to decide it was the perfect day for a Biggest Hairball Ever competition, which in the morning had me exasperated but by the end of the day had me concerned.

A year and a half ago, Cypress stopped eating, we never did figure out why. This caused bad things to happen to her liver, but she got pills and blood tests and more blood tests and prescription food she hated and more pills to make her want to eat the prescription food she hated and more blood tests to see how that was going and after a while the vet delivered himself of the opinion that she was probably okay now.

After that Cypress, who had always had the same sort of appetite you see on the Discovery Channel in late July, suddenly became ultra-finicky and stopped eating nearly all treats she was offered along with pretty much everything else until we settled on the new line of Fancy Feast, which she will eat as long as she doesn't get the same flavor twice in a day and as long as I replace the plate with a new one as soon as she indicates she's bored with it.

I'm unemployed and rarely go anywhere and don't sleep much, so this has worked out reasonably okay until yesterday, when she picked at her food a little, and kept barfing. She's always been a hair-trigger regurgitator, mostly because she would eat fast and then throw it up when it made her stomach hurt. We've learned to live with this, and we don't own any heirloom rugs nor do we keep electronics equipment or books on the floor. We do a lot of laundry and we own a Spot-Bot.

But yesterday she wasn't eating much, and sometime around four AM with me worried since about noon, she went into the bathroom and managed to throw up what was essentially just bile. (I'd warn you guys about this sort of thing but after the recipes there's probably no chance people with delicate constitutions read here anyway.)

So at seven thirty when the vet opened, I called, and we took her in at eight thirty after I wheedled a bit. They know I'm paranoid, and they mostly assume it's probably nothing when I call, because it usually is, but they do try to humor me presumably because they have kids in college.

I'm not the sort of person who digs suspense in real-life situations, to be honest even when writing fiction I like to warn people that X bad thing will happen but that nobody will die as a result of it. So if the vet had laughed me out of the office and told me it was nothing, you may safely assume I'd have told you that to start.

What he did say--after taking her temperature twice and deciding she'd lost some more weight and taking her blood and giving her an injection of something to keep her from barfing and giving her some IV fluids, and telling me she was drooling in my hair (by which time I was definitely less than calm about demanding to be told what was the problem)--was that he didn't think it was intestinal cancer, which was something that hadn't even occurred to me and therefore I was not overjoyed to have it mostly ruled out, but that it might be her liver again and they won't know till they get blood tests and here's an appetite stimulant.

As an aside, the appetite stimulant my cat is getting is one of the drugs that my neurologist has me on to mitigate the effects of the Inderal zombies, and I would possibly argue that giving someone at my weight an appetite stimulant borders on the insane. It's manufactured by Cypress Pharmaceuticals, though, which is entirely irrelevant but has led to some confusion over bottles the last time she was taking it.

So, if you see me restlessly haunting your comments sections, clicking on your blog twice in an hour, or commenting in an even more incoherent fashion than usual, it's because I have a cat fitfully asleep on my foot and I can't pace, which is what I really want to be doing.

If you can, and it's the sort of thing you do, please spare a few good thoughts for her to whoever or whatever it is you may find yourself praying to. Because she's my baby, and I don't want her to be sick or to hurt, and I really don't know what I'll do without her when she eventually dies and I'd like to put that off for a while.

And though she does indeed hate you, it really is nothing personal.