I'm sitting at home waiting for yet another visit from a Comcast tech. I so desperately would love to kick their filthy unreliable cable modem service out of my home and switch to slower, but more reliable, DSL. But that's an extra ten bucks a month. I figure I may as well use the time and get a couple short entries out.
Jezebel is not well. Over the weekend, she got very sluggish and nearly stopped eating — she'd eat some food if we put it in front of her, but she suddenly stopped harassing us for food every two hours, as was her habit. So we took her to the vet on Wednesday.
It turns out she's suffering from severe kidney problems. About 75% failure. She's about 9 or 10 (we aren't sure, since she was an adult when Nicole got her), and these things can start happening to cats at that age; when I was a kid, few people expected their cats to live longer than that. But these days, with modern veterinary medicine, an indoor cat can be expected to live past 15 easily, even to as much as 20 on occasion. So we were hoping for another few years.
We may still get them, though not as many as we wanted. Paws, a cat we took in when I was in second grade, lived four years after being diagnosed with a similar problem. The trick is getting the cat to keep eating and drinking lots of water. A trick Paws's vet used was very small injections of valium, which for some reason kick-started his appetite. As long as he was eating and drinking, he was pretty healthy and happy, so it was worth prolonging his life that way.
Jezebel has been put on some special food designed to help with the kidneys, and fortunately she seems to like it. So with any luck, we'll be able to keep her around for a little while yet. But there's this feeling now that we're on a clock, and just as Moxie has been my one constant companion for the last six and a half years, Jezebel has been Nicole's. So she's awfully down about it, as you can imagine. And to make matters more difficult for her, she doesn't want to seem upset in front of Jezebel, because that tends to make her (the cat, not Nicole) hide under the bed.
I've been adding a whole lot of back entries over the past week. I'm most of the way through November 1998 and working forward. I'm not going entirely in order; the entries with photos are a pain to move, so I'm skipping them and will come back to them later. But the archives are slowly fleshing out.
Man Out of Time: A bad month for cats
http://www.manoutoftime.org/article.php?story=20040910073606402