This post is long overdue…

As you might recall, August started off with a bang, and not the bang for which we were hoping. I mentioned the middle of the night trip to the emergency vet with Hemingway in this earlier post. Well, he improved somewhat through August, but never regained vision in his left eye. The diagnosis was that he either suffered a head trauma or had a tumor. We could find out if he had a tumor by seeing a kitty nuerologist and having a kitty MRI which could conclude that he needed kitty brain surgery. We contemplated this deeply, and concluded that all of that misery to marginally extend Hemingway’s time with us would probably be motivated more by selfishness than by a genuine interest in his quality of life…debatable I admit, but this is our conclusion.

Then came September, which openned up with Hemingway disappearing. I had contemplated this possibility as well. Would he run off to die and leave a big gaping hole at the end of his story and many days of fretting in between? Hemingway at one time was an apartment cat, but once he got a taste of the inside/outside life he genuinely loved it. However, he almost never leaves the immediate vicinity of the house, so his disappearance did not bode well. Nin will often disappear for a couple of days if, for example, children are present. But, she doesn’t totally disappear, she sneaks in at night and then makes herself scarce during the day. Hemingway has never been more than a call of his name away, so we worried, and worried early. We took Huxley for a walk and didn’t see any signs of our poor old man. Two days passed…and we were pretty convinced he was curled up dead in shrub somewhere…I tried to hold out hope that someone took him in, or something, the open ended disappearance ached a dull and deep and frustrating ache…

On the second day of his disappearance, we got a call from the animal shelter, but the news wasn’t very good. They had been called to pick up Hemingway, but he was profoundly weak and seriously dehydrated. They were able to contact us because yes, we had microchips implanted in our animals. I have become a strong advocate of this, particularly for cats since keeping a collar on them is nearly impossible (and a bit dangerous). Admittedly, if Huxley had been chipped we wouldn’t have him now, but given his abandonment and the way he acts around the broom, his previous owners probably didn’t care much about (or possibly were even the architects of) his disappearance. Anyway, what I’m saying is, if you give a shit about your animal, get them chipped.

So, another of the many advantages of working for myself from home is that I was able to immediately take off for the animal shelter to transport him to our vet. The King County Animal Shelter is desperately under-funded and over-extended, which just amplifies my great appreciation for the fact that they administered sub-q fluids and drew blood for tests at no charge prior to my arrival to pick up Hemingway. We don’t know what caused him to disappear since aside from the blindness in one eye he had seemed to have recovered from his earlier issue, but it took a week at the vet to get him healthy enough to bring home. Profoundly weak, potassium poor, dehydrated and potentially suffering from both urinary and brain stem infections.

Hemingway is stronger now, but completely blind, after about 2 weeks at home. For the first time ever he is eating wet food (only took a couple of weeks of hand feeding with a syringe to get him accustomed to it). Because Nin decided she was queen of the roost, the stairs are still too dangerous for weakened cat, and don’t exactly know how the other two animals will behave with the blind old man…Hemingway is living primarily in my office. He is a little bit prone to getting trapped in tight spaces if left entirely to his own devices, so for the time being I put him in the very large dog crate at night. He’s not thrilled about the situation, but I wouldn’t be either if I suddenly went blind at about age 70. It would be very, very difficult to euthenize him at this point since aside from the blindness he does of some quality of life. We are still giving him antibiotics for about another week. One half a pill every twelve hours, and each day he gets a little bit better at fighting us and hiding it in his mouth only to spit it out after we are done. His claws are starting to get sharp again. In fact just today he started sharpening them on a cardboard box in my office again. Another sign he is returning to some level of normal. Still, I worry that he seems to be urinating more than he is drinking, but then, so do I…

An old picture of Camus the cat taking a nap on our dear old man...