The Story of Custard (part 2)

A couple of years ago his kidneys started to fail.  We put him on special food, and made sure there was plenty of water, but we also had to give him subcutaneous fluids every other day. I may have previously described the fun and games of this exercise, but in summery he hated it. And he let us know by becoming invisible. He could be in our laps all evening, but the instant the thought crossed our minds that it was time for fluids, he had disappeared. It's not that he left at that moment, he just wasn't there anymore. No one saw him leave. We could look and look and not find him. Then when we gave up and got ready for bed, poof, he was back. On rare occasion he won and we did it the next morning, but usually we stayed up and did it.

The last few months he gave up becoming invisible (or disapprating for you Harry Potter fans) altogether, and all we had to do was scoop him out of our lap and carry him away. I always tried to anthropomorphize onto him the idea that he understood we were helping him live longer, but really, he was just too old to fight it. And we never felt bad subjecting him to it. He loved being alive, and the price he had to pay was fifteen minutes every 48 hours.

Of course these fluids had to go somewhere and this meant extra litter boxes, which I've since put away. But we bought nearly two years with the fluids. It was totally worth it.



Thanks for reading.

Blog-a-Palooza is off and running

A couple of years ago someone had the bright idea to make November National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), in the fashion of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), except for people who don't intend to write just one giant story. The plan is a post a day for the whole month. I did it two years ago but skipped last year. The writing muscles are twitching for action but the brain is screaming, "I don't have any ideas." The brain tends to use all caps and excessive exclamation points, as in, "I DON'T HAVE ANY IDEAS!!!" My brain has never taken 'Strunk and White 'or the rules of shouting on the internet seriously.

So, this is post number one, on day number one. Consider yourselves warned.

But, we begin Blog-a-Palooza 2013 with a note of sadness. Yesterday we lost one of our furry friends. Custard, the grand orange kitty, came a few weeks short of turning nineteen. He'd taken a turn during the past few days and last evening we helped him along.

I'll tell Custard stories this month, but not tonight.

My Cat is Trying to Kill Me

I have sleep apnea, and I use one of those CPAP machines at night. For those who do not know, the CPAP forces pressurized air into my nose via a mask I wear that makes me look like I have a monkey on my face (I stole that analogy--thanks LIE).

I have woken up with my machine turned off and I recently discovered why. My cat sits on it and pushes the off button. I think it's on purpose. He doesn't understand that the mask is designed to let me breath when the machine goes off, or else there'd be a rash of suffocation deaths every time someone crashed into a power pole. Every time he turns it off I eventually wake up and turn it back on, saying, 'Nice try, Custard.' He's undeterred. He must really have it out for me. And I'm not even the one who gives him sub Q fluids every other night.