Still Life, With Cats

So for the past who-the-heck-knows how many years Richard and I have been hosting Holidailies, which is a daily blogging thing that runs during the month of December. It was started by another couple entirely, but then we took over when they decided they didn’t want to run it anymore, and this past year they decided to sign the domain over to us and hand it off completely.

Richard’s been talking for years about how he wanted to someday give the code an overhaul (this is in no way a reflection of the quality of what the original folks created; it’s just that any system starts to get a bit clunky after more than 10 years, especially as the rest of the internets kept on updating around it). This year he finally decided to give it a go.

We tossed around a couple of ideas for things we’d like to incorporate, and one of the ideas was to open the portal up for more than just the month of December. I came up with the idea of Horrordailies for October. Admittedly I was a bit vague on how that might actually work, but Richard’s preferred style of fiction writing tends to be horror or comic horror so I figured it might give him something to play with.

Anyway. All of this is to say that the site has been revamped, basic functionality is working (fingers crossed) and we’ve opened it up to beta users with the hopes that they’ll poke at it and play with it and let us know what isn’t working. If all goes as planned, Richard will have time to get all the (major) bugs smoothed out prior to the official launch in December, but in the meantime some of us really ought to be posting stuff to it. I suppose some of us also includes me.

Technically I ought to do a recap of everything I’ve been up to in the past several months, but I don’t really feel like it quite yet, so instead I shall share a short little story about Azzie.

Azzie is sixteen years old, with long black hair that tends to mat if you look at him cross-eyed (naturally, since he HATES being brushed with the fury of a thousand angry suns) and big round eyes and the brain power of your average overripe avocado. He is cute, but oh, he is dim. Here is an example.

Our house is 100 or so years old, and as is the way of old houses, some of the doors don’t quite hang true anymore. The closet in the office is one such door and we gave up long ago on trying to keep it shut. The latch doesn’t actually latch; the door itself just swings slowly open. The only thing that keeps it (mostly) closed is the fact that the door to the office itself opens into the door to the closet, so since we keep *that* door open all the time, that at least keeps the closet door mostly shut. There is still, however, always a bit of a gap. It is important that you keep this in mind, that there is a gap. Plus neither door is heavy and the cats all figured out that they could go in and out at will, just by pawing at the closet door.

All the cats, that is, but Azzie.

I was downstairs dealing with laundry and heard him start to holler. He’s gotten noisier as he gets older, so at first I thought it was just his usual ‘where are you?’ yelling, but then I realized it was getting more insistent so I came upstairs and went looking for him.

And by now possibly you have figured out where I found him. Somehow he got himself into the closet. But then, unlike every single other cat who has ever lived in this house, he couldn’t figure out how to get back out. So I saw him, through the gap, yelling at me, because he was stuck.

I reached out and poked at the door. It swung open with the power of one finger. Clearly he could have managed it himself if he’d tried.

Poor little Azzie. Sometimes the world is awfully hard for those who have very little brain.

Posting for Horrordailies. Boo.

No one in this house is at ALL a fan.

The letter B is brought to you by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge

Cancer.

It isn’t a surprise. Not really. We wanted it to be something else but I think we both knew before the appointment this morning what the vet was going to say. There is more going on than just the tumor (likely bone infection), but really, the actual diagnosis doesn’t make a difference. What matters is that it’s eventually going to kill her.

We’ll pamper our elderly little tortie cat as much as we can over the next few weeks or months or however long her good days will last, and we will monitor her quality of life. At her age there isn’t really anything else we can do. Right now the vet doesn’t think it’s bothering her, but that’s only a matter of time. And when it looks like she is starting to feel bad, then we will make the hardest decision and we will help her go.

The letter C is brought to you by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.

So we thought things were doing pretty well with Rosie, after the initial diagnosis of the oral fistula. But then she started slowly refusing to eat, and we realized she was losing weight, so back to the vet we went again, this time for blood tests. Naturally, they came back inconclusive, because apparently nothing with Rosie can ever be cut and dried. They gave us some medication to help calm her gut, we bought out the stock of beef baby food from every grocery store in the surrounding few miles (since that’s the only flavor she showed any interest in), and we settled in to see if things would improve.

And thankfully, they did. Slowly. Of course, she now refuses to eat the brand of cat food she was eating before, but we’re used to that kind of ‘fun’ (because it would be cheaper to buy cans of food by the case, except when the cat for whom you buy it is known to be picky and suddenly decide that a flavor she’s been eating for months is no longer acceptable, thus leaving you with a largely untouched stack of cans that are now useless). Luckily we found a brand she *will* eat, and over the past two weeks she’s been steadily improving, even gaining back nearly half the pound she lost in the two weeks prior.

Alas, along with the returning appetite came the returning mouth issues. We’ve been monitoring it for a couple days to see if it might clear up on its own, but no such luck. Our regular vet couldn’t get us in until some time next week, so we decided to bite the bullet and take her to the one that’s really close to our house (we don’t go to this one normally because they have this annoying tendency to push lots of expensive tests and treatments that are completely unnecessary, and sure enough, they did it this time too, ugh. Lucky we’re both very good at saying no).

Thankfully, instead of sending her home with a bottle of medicine (because while she’s super easy to pill, dosing her with liquid medication is a nightmare), they gave her a single shot that will supposedly do the trick. So now we get to sit back and wait, and keep an eye on hole in her mouth to see if it gets better.

And whatever we do, we are not going to Google oral cancer. Nope. Not again.

The letter V is brought to you by the Blogging from A to Z Challenge

Every morning for the past few weeks, as soon as I sit down at my desk, Nutmeg comes tearing into the office, dashes up the cat tree, and then proceeds to flail around wildly on the top of my desk. Occasionally a little head peeks (often upside down) over the edge, but primarily the only way I know she’s there is the sound of her sliding around on the wood.

At some point she then decides it’s time to see what I’m up to, so then I look up to see a fuzzy little gargoyle peering down at me.

I’m not sure why the top of my desk has suddenly become the best place to play in the morning. But when one lives with cats one learns that it’s really pointless to ask ‘why’. And at least if she is flailing around being cute up there, she is *not* gnawing on the corner of the ledge over the window. No, I have no idea why she does *that* either.

*****

So – an update on Rosemary and her weird mouth hole.

I took her to our regular vet on Wednesday, as per the instructions of the emergency vet. They’d faxed over all the info so our regular vet would have a heads up, and he was, I think, prepared for something really awful. But he opened her mouth and peered in and seemed more than a bit surprised that it wasn’t as bad as he was expecting.

We still have no idea what caused the hole in the first place. She had a bunch of teeth extracted back in November, but it’s not anywhere near where those came out. It is most likely a fistula, although he doesn’t think it goes all the way through to the nasal cavity (and after being extra snuffly and sneezy the few days prior to the vet appointment = because when one’s human is nervously Googling oral-nasal fistulas, and oral abscesses, and oral tumors (for the love of all that is holy do *not* Google oral tumors!), it is important to try to work in as many extra symptoms as you can just to mess with her head, after all – she’s no longer doing that either). The sides of the hole look smooth and clean – no sign of infection at all, so clearly the antibiotics have been doing their job. And bonus, he said it looks as if it’s actually trying to heal up.

So – current plan is that she gets to finish out the 10 days of the antibiotics (which isn’t any fun for us humans because Reasons that you really do not want me to go into more detail on, although I will say that i am SO VERY GLAD WE DO NOT HAVE CARPET), and we’ll keep an eye on it, but right now, the news is all good. Phew.