The Meowsoleum

04/09/2023

I really don’t check this page much anymore, but we are now six (cats). It’s been a while and I’m sorry I didn’t post the sooner, but on November 26, 2022, we lost Olivette, the mother of the four kittens, to mammary cancer.

This is what happens when people are irresponsible, don’t fix their kitties when they’re younger, and let them out to do whatever for however long and have however many litters until one day they show up on your back deck as a stray, hungry and cold, and eventually obviously pregnant.

I estimated that she was at least seven years old at the time because her kittens were a year younger. The vet said she’s probably much older than that but it’s hard to tell.

God knows how many litters of kittens she’d had before she showed up on my deck.

God knows how she avoided getting a pyometra.

But, I finally did get her spayed, after years of building her trust, and it was at her spay that we discovered the lumps.

The upside was, she was much calmer, and she became more affectionate once the hormones died down. She took naps in my lap for long periods of time and enjoyed sitting calmly by the window sniffing the air all summer and watching the world go by.

I like to think that she was thankful for having some peace of mind, because she had been so feral, so afraid, and so hormonal that she really wasn’t happy for a long time.

I’d like to think that she had some happiness in her final months, finally enjoying being a lap cat, and I was with her when she left this world.

My biggest regret is that I waited so long to spay her, knowing full well what the risk was; because I missed out on more time with the delightful cat that she was once she was spayed.

Then again, surgery like that can sometimes wake up things that were lying dormant, things like cancer cells that hadn’t yet decided to grow. There is always a possibility that had she been spayed earlier, I would’ve also lost her earlier if the surgery had activated the cancer.

One can never know except in hindsight.

I learned a lot from her though, knowledge I will take with me into the future. She was an excellent little orange and white cat, I miss her yodels and I miss her little white feet, her little toes.

The rest of us are so far thank goodness healthy, the kittens will be seven on the 20th, Tallulah will be nine, and Maeve is probably a senior in her teens but we just don’t pay attention to age.

So that’s the update, which came after spending most of the evening adjusting all of the settings to ensure that my page is no longer a spam fest. Hope you all are doing well.

08/09/2020

I guess I haven't been here in a while, but all I have are sad updates.

In 2019, we lost Stanley and Jake.

Stanley passed on March 7th to complications from HCM, CHF, CKD, and anemia. He was just turning or had turned five. Stanley was one of the newcomers who joined the Meowsoleum in 2014. He also had stomatitis and feline herpes. His life was a medical battle, but he was so very loved.

We also lost Jake on May 20th (2019). His was a rather sudden onset of kidney issues, and within five days of diagnosis, I came home from work to find he'd passed. He was 19 years old. He's the solid orange tiger in the upper right of the cover photo.

And, of course, today we lost Tyler.

However, Maeve, Tallulah, Olivette (Mamakitty), and Ollie's kittens Spencer, Jasper, Zavier and Olympia are all thriving. The Kittens turned four this year, and Maeve is now the eldest at 10.

I'll try to be better at posting.

08/09/2020

08/09/2020

And now, the Original Five, the ones in the cover photo, all of them are gone. I now have only seven cats.

Tyler Whitefeet, 05/09/2004 - 08/09-2020. He passed very quickly at 4:09 AM Ohio time from either a stroke, a heart attack, or a clot. He joins his brother Blue over the Bridge, along with Zander, Ophelia, Jake, Stanley, and Vincent and Pandora--the latter two of whom were not officially part of the Meowsoleum but have honorary status. He is survived by his Meowmy Jeanne, and feline siblings Tallulah, Maeve, Olivette, Olympia, Spencer, Jasper and Zavier.

It was maybe 10 minutes from his being totally normal to sudden symptoms, collapse and death. I was with him and saw the whole thing, I was right there by his side as he left. I knew I couldn't do anything. I knew there wasn't time to get him to an ER. I just knew. The closest one is 30 minutes away. So instead of bolting to get dressed, I just stayed there. It was over in moments. Even if the ER had been right next door, we wouldn't have made it in time to save him.

On top of megacolon, diagnosed in April 2019, he also had heart issues (Dx August 2019) and kidney insufficiency.
In November, the cardiologist diagnosed him with "massive genetic cardiac deformities" and gave him 40 days tops. That was 261 days ago.

It's been 357 days since the scary breathing episode last August where my Supervet diagnosed him with CHF and HCM; and 498 days since the former vet gave up on him after five unsuccessful attempts in five weeks' time to deobstipate him and said Tyler was out of options, his kidneys were "done" (without blood tests to back that up) and it was time to put him down. This led us to the one I call Supervet, who fixed him, diagnosed him with Megacolon, ran blood work and found his kidneys were fine, and got him on meds that kept him comfortably going for the past year and a half.

I guess he showed THEM, huh. There was a reason one of his nicknames was Tytanium Kitteh. He was 16. He and his late brother Blue were bottle babies I raised from about five weeks old after their mother was killed. I'm so thankful he gave me the extra time I needed after the Dx of Megacolon and heart disease so I could be sure he knew how much I loved him. (The tortie in the one photo is Tallulah, who adored her Squishyman.)

RIP, my dear old cat. My baby. I already miss you.

03/05/2017

Meow. It would have been Zander's 19th birthday yesterday, were he still with us. But this is birthday month, and next up we have Stanley (3/12), who will be three, and who is facing dental surgery due to his chronic stomatitis and herpes and the vicious cycle interplay they cause, with infections and passing symptoms back and forth.

I cringe at how painful it would be if they take the majority of his teeth all at once, but then I realize, with the chronic gum infections and possible hidden abscesses, he's likely been in pain anyway, so the outcome would be eventual relief once he heals.

On 3/23, Jake will turn 17. He's doing well. He has bunchy fur again toward the tail, and oh, MY is he crabby when I try to undo the dreadlocks. I won't worry, though; last time, it worked itself out as he shed.

And then we'll be on to April, and the kittens will turn a year old on the 20th.

Everyone else is fine. All ten of them.

12/30/2016

We have not posted in a cat's age! Everyone is well. The kittens are over eight months old. Jasper is ENORMOUS. Spencer is the next biggest. Zavier and Olympia are really about normal size for their age.

Yes, everyone stayed. So the Meowsoleum is currently at 10 and holding.

Olympia's mangled foot fell off, and after a few rough starts, she figured out how to get around on three feet and is AMAZING. She's quicker than the boys, and you'd never know she was minus a foot. Cats are surprisingly adaptable.

For the first six months, it was a cycle of her stump healing, callousing, then coming off, bleeding a bit, being sore, re-healing... the vet said just put Neosporin on it when it was angry, but leave it alone otherwise. I tried once to wrap it, but that lasted about an hour before it was "removed" by her.

It's pretty much staying healed now. Every now and then when she's overly active it gets angry, but overall, she's fine.

The boys got fixed at four months of age. The girls will be fixed within the year. Momcat Olivette is still skittish and may never be able to integrate with the others; the kittens have met the Big Cats and the meetings have been amicable with only hissing, so it bodes well. However, they are so BIG already! Usually it's easier when they're little, but... they grew A LOT.

And so we come to the close of another year, with Jake being the Eldercat now (he'll be 17 in March). He's doing well, and we'll be kissing the cats at midnight tomorrow to ring in 2017. May it turn out to be a far better year than many of us anticipate it being.

07/07/2016

Second update.

Zander is home now. The box with his ashes is on the shelf in the main cat room, next to his oldest buddy, Ophelia (07/06/2015), and near Blue's box too (02/25/2014).

I told the crematorium, no offense, but this is the third time in three years I've been up here, and I didn't want to see them again for at least five years.

They agreed.

07/07/2016

Two updates. First this one.

This afternoon, I was able to speak with the vet we'd been seeing this year, who did the EPI test on Zander and identified the IBD, pancreatitis, B12 deficiency, and other things. He'd been out of town last week when the final crisis hit, so we'd seen a different vet at the same clinic.

I described to our vet the symptoms Zander had exhibited in the week since we'd seen our vet: the increasing muscle weakness, the rear legs not holding him up, then the weakness gradually progressing to his front legs, and the incontinence. I reported what the other vet had found, all systems normal except a high WBC count and BUN, and the diagnosis of infection or cancer.

My vet's take on it was that it could have been cancer, but more likely a secondary infection on top of all of his other IBD etc. issues.
Given the mobility problems and the suddenness of the onset, he's thinking brain or spinal infection.

Which in retrospect would also explain his face being a tad swollen, his goopy eye, the dizzy spells he had when he'd tilt his head up to look at me and fall over, the occasional momentary confusion that I passed off as senility, and the inability to hold in his poosplosion for even a few minutes. The last time he actually used the litter box, it was only because I lifted him up and put him in. He walked up to it and just stood there as if he wasn't sure what he'd gone there for.

In a younger, overall healthier cat, an infection of this type would have responded better to the antibiotics. A younger, healthier cat might have bounced back from this with little residual effect.

In a cat of 18, with multiple long-term chronic health issues with digestion, metabolism, and kidneys, who had very little muscle tone and poor body condition overall...

He just didn't have the reserves to fight anything additional. Coming back from that kind of thing would have been very hard at his age. He may not have regained full mobility or bladder/bowel control.

Given his many years of trouble with poo consistency, and vacillating between straining versus poosplosions, it didn't occur to me that it might be lack of muscle control, rather than constipation or diarrhea from the IBD etc.

Rushing him to the ER last Saturday would have been futile, and just more stressful for Zander. The end result would have been the same.

My poor old cat.

On the upside, when I first contacted this vet in January, Zander was in such bad shape I was just hoping he'd make it to his 18th birthday on March 4th and I honestly wasn't very confident that he would.

Instead, with this vet's treatment plan, Zander not only made it to his birthday, but he made it to my birthday and to last weekend. And he had a few good weeks in there where he started to poo normally, and to have some relief from a lifetime of ravenous hunger.

Though I'm still devastated that my Big Red Tabby is no more, I feel a bit better, knowing I really did do everything that I could for him. It the guilt, knowing it wasn't anything I did or didn't do; it was just something beyond all reasonable control, the final straw on an overloaded camel's back, that finally took him from me.

07/03/2016

We haz a sadz in the Meowsoleum today. Our eldest, Zander, aka Frumious Zandercat, Zander Zee, Zanziferous Kitten, Big Z, the Z-Meister, Z-Man, Big Red Tabby, ZanZan, Zandrogynous, Zanzifrans (among others) has left us to go over the Bridge.

It wasn't entirely unexpected, as he was over 18 with a myriad of metabolic, digestive and kidney issues, but because he'd been improving with treatment, the downturn last week, the speed of his decline, and the suddenness of his death within 48 hours of his last vet visit were not expected. And it is devastating.

He'd even been given a good report the week before; initially, the new symptoms he'd exhibited were thought to be an IBD/B12 deficiency flare up, but the treatments did not improve him and on the second visit last Thursday (with our usual vet out of town, this was a new guy we'd never seen), we learned that despite that and despite his CBC being largely good, he was within two weeks of demise.

He was down to 4.7 lbs, and his white blood cell count and BUN were both high. WBC is either infection or cancer, and BUN is kidneys. We'd thought his CRF/CKD was gone; after changing diets and adding other treatments, his levels had returned to normal after a diagnosis of Stage One in 2014. I've since learned that in end stage renal failure, BUN goes up, and the other levels go down--giving people false hope that the cat is improving.

The truth is, those levels go down because creatinine is produced by the muscles, and with severe muscle wasting, none is produced. With severe dehydration (he was unable to maintain it despite frequent subQs), urea is not produced (because he wasn't urinating as much).

Those levels apparently drop shortly before death. Whether we lost him to cancer or kidney failure or a combination of those and other things will forever remain a mystery. The only thing we do know is that nothing could have been done to change the outcome that wasn't already being done. It was simply his time, and he passed peacefully beside me at 1:33 PM yesterday afternoon. It was a very long night for us all. Stanley, Jake, Tallulah and Tyler and I were with him the entire time.

We are in shock, we are devastated. We lost him within 360 days of Ophelia's passing last year (July 6th). As of now, the three kitties to the left in the cover photo are gone. Blue, Zander, Ophelia. Only Jake and Tyler from the original five remain. Jake is the eldest now at 16, and as Zander and Ophelia were the only cats I had when he came on board as a kitten, Jake has lost his two oldest lifelong friends.

And so the Meowsoleum is now Jake, Tyler, Maeve, Stanley, Tallulah, Olivette and Kittens 1-4, Spencer, Jasper, Zavier and Olympia. And Big Head Todd aka Charles Todd outside, every three days or so.

RIP, Zander. You are so very loved and missed.

(PS: Olympia's stump is healing nicely and she's adapting beautifully.)

05/06/2016

Cat updates: Zander's holding steady. Hasn't gained any weight, but he's feeling better.

Kittens are two weeks and one day old today. The calico (Olympia) went to see the vet when she was six days old because the foot looked worse. The vet said the foot was dead, and it was "self-amputating" already. She was too little to safely anesthetize for an amputation, but he said nature is incredible with animals this little, that eventually the foot would fall off, and the stump would heal itself. He gave her a dose of antibiotics to ward off infection.

True to his word, the foot withered up, turned gray, and fell off. There was a gross couple of days where she had exposed bone, but no blood, no pain, no nothing. Eventually, it just closed over, and it's healing up nicely. She actually uses it as if there is a foot there, and all four (three boys, one girl) are growing up nicely, as you can see. Olivette is getting friendlier though not completely trusting me just yet. She wavers between trust and over-protectiveness.