Unnecessary Supplement: February 2019

So, life and death happens simultaneously. Joy, relief and grief.

Last night, February 15th, I became a great aunt. I've always been an absent to passable aunt. Last night, our niece and nephew's first child, Wrenley Jane, was born. And I became great (aunt). I don't know if I will be able to live up to the title, but I will try. Mama and baby seem happy and healthy. thanks to the internets & facebook, I have gotten to see lots of photos. I love this little bundled swaddled in girly pink flowery print and a big pink bow on her little head. I'm so happy for our young niece and nephew who are so excited to be new parents. And I'm thrilled for my sister and our niece's mom to be grandmothers!

In other sad news....
This morning, on February 16, our feline buddy, Stinksy, finally passed on to the green meadows in the sky. He was a strong little guy. His mother was a little slut and his dad was the neighborhood tomcat.

In 2005, we had lost my soul cat, Tiki Tee, the week before Mardi Gras.

It was a pretty quick illness. He had kidney failure, and he passed away less than a week of getting sick. After he died, his brother, Chester, just meowed all day. Tiki was the alpha male, and Chester was like the big goofball omega male. We thought he was slightly slow, and he just didn't know how to cat properly without his little smarter brother.

So, when our friend told us she needed to bring her kittens to the SPCA, we went up to her apartment to wrangle a companion for Chester. They were fast little fuckers, and none of them wanted to go home with us. We originally tried to catch the female nun cat, but she was spry and slippery. At one point, they basically ran across the floor to hide under the bed, and Stinksy was the one that got caught. So, we loaded him in the too big carrier and hauled him down the street to our house. He instantly took to Chester to be his surrogate mom. Chester wasn't having it. He looked at us like, this is who you bring home when I tell you I'm lonely?

We had trouble naming the little kitty at first. He was so cute, but really a little terror. He didn't know common sense things. Like, don't play with our eyeballs during REM sleep. We had to sleep with the sheets over our heads. And we were so allergic to him. We seriously contemplated trying to give him away. But, we didn't want him to end up at the shelter in the fireplace. We knew that the bigger he got, the less appealing he was. After all, he was just a bicolor tabby domestic shorthair. So we kept him and just bought a lot of tissue. We couldn't think of a name for him. Damien, Beelzebub, Satan, Jaws... none of them stuck. For some reason, TFP one day called him Stinksy, and it just stuck. Although, we really called him Stinky most of the time. He never really stunk.

He rode out Katrina on the 10th floor of the Marriott hotel on Canal Street. He was still pretty young. The staff made us all go to the ballroom, so we had to leave the cats in the room. Stinksy pretty much just hid behind Chester the whole time. Later that year, we moved to San Diego. I got in a car accident a day or two before we were supposed to leave. So I had to stay back and deal with insurance. So, TFP travelled cross country with Chester and Stinksy in a 2 door Toyota Echo. Also, Stinksy had a cone. We had gotten him neutered, and the vet had dug into his stomach looking for one of the testicles that wasn't where it was supposed to be. It wasn't anywhere. And then she stitched him up weird and sent him home sans cone. So, he chewed the stitches out. So, he had to get stapled and then restitched later, and coned.

Several months after we moved, Chester got renal failure too and passed away under our dining room table. Then it was Stinksy's turn to meow at us all day. So, we found a grey kitty on craigslist.

The Fuzz. She had medium length hair and toe tufts and ear tufts, and she was the cutest, if somewhat standoffish little cat. And Stinksy looked at us, like, this is who you get to keep me company? But, he grew to love her, and he showed her the ropes.

After 6 years in San Diego, we moved to Fort Lauderdale. This time, it was all four of us in a Honda Element. It was quite the adventure for them. They loved all the dingy seedy pet friendly hotel rooms we stayed at. So many scents and crannies to explore. They always were unhappy the next morning when we packed them up and put them back in the car. One particularly scary Economy Inn in Texas was their favorite. It had two beds, and they spent a lot of time jumping from bed to bed, over and over.

Stinksy wanted to be an indoor/outdoor cat, but we just couldn't bring ourselves to allow this. But, we did let him roam around out back when we were outside. A little while after we moved to Florida, we got a puppy, Rudy, which of course, the cats hated.

And the puppy grew, and they hated him more. But the puppy learned the command, "get Stinky" and he would chase him out of the bushes and back into the house.

In 2017, our dear little cat, The Fuzz, was dying from renal failure. We were sent home with subcutaneous fluids, which we had to pump under her skin every day to keep her hydrated. She hated it, but she wasn't a fighter, so she gave up easily and let us do it. She was suffering slowly, so finally we had to euthanize her. This was one of the most devastating days of my life. I hope to never have to do it again. But I know it was the right choice. She was TFP's baby girl, and it hit him harder than I think he would have ever guessed. He still grieves her today and has trouble looking at pictures of her.

Stinky was lonely after The Fuzz passed, but we knew it was not a good time to get another cat. We were so busy at work, we were making moves to sell the restaurant, and we didn't know what our future held. So, we were down to a one cat, one dog household. Stinksy and Rudy didn't love each other, but they seemed to form an understanding. Unless human food was involved.

Last summer, Stinksy stopped eating, and in a matter of days, he started showing signs of renal failure & he was alarmingly skinny. So we took him to the vet. They were worried about renal failure, but it looked like it was brought on by an infected tooth. So, he was given antibiotics and B12, and we were sent home with subcutaneous fluids once again. Stinksy wasn't nearly as cooperative as The Fuzz, so finally I had to get a zip bag that looks like a travel toiletry bag with zippers for the front paws & a velcro wrap for the neck.

Even with the bag on him, he sometimes found a way to slither across the table. But we gave him the fluids, and after a few weeks, he was back to his old self.

And then, the infection came back right before we moved to New Orleans. And the rest... you can read on previous blog posts...

stinksy's story

stinksy's story continued

Anyway, the last couple of weeks, we had him on Fentanyl. They have patches that you can get at the pharmacy. But, it's Fentanyl, so it's not like pharmacies have loads of it in stock. So we had trouble getting it. In between that, we gave him liquid buprenorphine. We were drugging our cat with opioids. No other vet had ever suggested opioids to us. Of course, Stinksy had a rapidly growing tumor taking over his mouth. So, I guess that is much different than renal failure.

Anyway, he ate 2 big cans of cat food a day or two before we applied the first Fentanyl patch to him. And that was the last he ate. I was still gave him cat food with a moat of chicken or beef stock around it for about 10 days after he stopped eating. But, I don't even think he really drank the stock at that point. Each patch was good for 5 days. You could definitely tell the difference between the first and the fifth day. We gave him 3 patches in a row, then we had to go five days with buprenorphine before we were able to get him another patch. He died sometime in the night, or rather, early this morning. So, he went like 22 or 23 days with virtually no food. He only stopped drinking water 2 days ago. He couldn't drink with his tongue, so he would stand on the kitchen sink divider and let the water from the tap drip into his mouth. But he stopped drinking because I think it was difficult for him to stand there, and it was getting more difficult for him to lean his head just so, so the water would drip into his mouth.

these photos are maybe 3 weeks apart.

I know this is a graphic photo, but I want to help others who find themselves with a cat with oral squamous cell carcinoma. I don't think there's enough information out there for people like me.

I googled "how long can a cat survive without food". And all the websites said two weeks tops. Stinksy was a fighter. He just had to defy the google search results. And he had always been clean. We knew it was almost over when he started sleeping most of the time in his litter box. He had stopped peeing, but still, he would wake up with litter caked all over him. Last night, he was just laying on a cat scratcher. We brought him into the bedroom with us, on the cat scratcher. Sometime in the night, he dragged himself off the scratcher into the hallway, and he just died right there, stretched out. Of course, he didn't have any pee or poo left in him, so it was just him, dry and rigid. Even in death he tried to be as clean as he could be. We imagine that he found The Fuzz and is leading the way for her. Because she had probably gotten lost in the otherworld, not knowing how to get to heaven and having no help. Tiki Tee wouldn't have helped her because he was a little bitch to other cats, and he definitely would have been very jealous of The Fuzz. But now, all four of our beloved cats are together.

Now we just have Rudy.

We haven't had a cat-less household since Summer of 1995. 😿😿😿😿😿😿😿 This afternoon, when Rudy and I walked into the house, I thought how strange that I didn't have to go searching for Stinksy to see if he was still alive. I already knew the answer. I started writing this blog post to put off cleaning out the litter box and putting it away. For now.

There couldn't be joy without grief, life without death. xoxoxoxo

So, I thought I would take a break from the heavy stuff of our terminally ill cat. I don't want to scare all 3 readers away. So, instead, today, I'm just going to post some photos I've taken over the couple months since we've moved to New Orleans.