Four Feet More

Things have been a bit out of sync over here lately. There has been a lot of the good mixed in with the bad, and it's left me a tad off-balance.

First of all, I've had a cold for the past week and a half, and I can't seem to shake it. Fortunately, it has not been accompanied by fevers and body aches, so I don't believe it is the dreaded swine flu. Thank goodness for that! I would like this stuffiness and coughing to go away now, though. After a particularly rough night, Jeff woke me this morning with a hug and a "Morning Jen. I hate you." Then he kissed my head, tucked the blankets around me, and got up. He was teasing, of course, but I did keep him up all night with my coughing. My poor, long-suffering husband. ;)

Things have also been a little different with my step-daughter, Ali. The good news is that she's contacting us a bit more regularly now, and she even came out for Eamon's birthday (it was the first time she's ever celebrated that with us). It was nice to see her and have her spend time with the family again. The bad news is that every time she contacts us, there seems to be a crisis of some sort. Often she needs money desperately, and sometimes there are other tragic events. First her boyfriend broke his back, and this week, a good friend of hers from high school died, along with 3 others, in a car crash on her way back from Vegas. Ali is naturally devastated, and I feel so bad for her because over the past few years, she seems to have separated herself from many of her support systems. It must be terribly hard to be living alone in a city away from family and close friends, especially during a such a difficult time. It is my hope that this horrible tragedy will have a silver lining, and Ali will examine the way her life is going and come to value family relationships once again.

The final blow for my week came yesterday, on Halloween. As you know, Rupert has not been doing so well. The tumor on his foot has been getting bigger, and he has been dropping weight. However, he was still acting like himself for the most part, and the foot didn't seem to be giving him any pain. Until yesterday. He had begun to get lethargic, but he still followed me around the house, purring when I said his name. However, as he walked through the kitchen, we noticed some blood on the floor. I immediately put his foot in warm water to clean it, and, well, I'll spare you all the gory details and just say that the tumor had broken though the skin and it was all-around unpleasant. Funny thing is, it still didn't seem to be causing Rupert any discomfort. He let me clean his foot without so much as a wince. But I knew that it wouldn't be long before the tumor would become infected and cause him great pain. So I took him into the vet, and she agreed that it was time to let him go. She also validated my decision not to amputate the foot, which made me feel a lot better because when faced with the decision of euthanasia, I began to question whether or not I could have done more for Rupert. In the end, he went peacefully, and Jeff, Vika and Eamon were there to give me hugs when I left the hospital in tears (they were not in the room with me - Jeff took the kids outside to pick flowers).

Fortunately, we had trick-or-treating to take the kids' minds off the loss of Rupert. It cheered me up too, to see Eamon running with his skinny little legs in his Obi-Wan Kenobi costume, and Vika preening around as an Asian Princess. Eamon usually wears baggier boy clothes, so to see him in a tight-fitting costume was a bit like seeing a fluffy cat that had just been doused with water. I don't know where that boy packs away all the food he eats! Both kids had a great time trick-or-treating and passing out candy at my mom's house (every time there was a knock on the door they jumped up and yelled, "Customers!!!"). They even scored some Baby Ruths, which naturally, I took as soon as they were in bed.


It was a fun end to a roller-coaster-week. But hopefully the coming days will be a bit more relaxed and I'll finally kick this cold. I also hope that where ever Rupert is, he's happily flinging around a milk top and surrounded by toilets with the lids up (his disgustingly favorite source of water). Goodbye little man. I'll miss you.

This is Rupert (with our brown tabby, Oona laying on top of him). Rupert Guaca Molay, to be precise. He came to our family when he was just 2 days old, eyes still closed and umbilical cord still attached. I was working in a Pet Hospital at the time, and a whole litter of newborn kittens was brought in, huddled together in a little shoebox. Six other employees and I each took one home, to bottle feed and eventually adopt out. Of the seven kittens, Rupert is the only one who survived. This is not due to my superior cat-raising skills, I assure you. The whole litter was just not healthy, and I think that Rupert may have been the strongest of the lot.

I remember those early days, waking up at all hours of the night to bottle feed this scruffy looking white kitten with a yellow stain on his back. He would scream out with a squeaky meow and would knead the air (we call it “making biscuits”) while I fed him. In fact, the only thing other than food that kept him quiet in those days was music by Sting. Go figure.

This little cat, despite his various anomalies, began to thrive and grow. The yellow stain on his back became a silver/gray patch that wound up extending to cover his head, half his face and his tail (which is striped, like a tabby’s). His eyes developed into a clear blue color, and his back legs grew to be much longer than his front, giving him a bit of a hot-rod-like appearance. People who met him would say, “Man, that is a freaky looking cat!” But I thought he was handsome, and when it came time to adopt him out, I decided that it would be better if he stayed with me instead.

And so he has been a member of our family for 14 years. He chirps in pleasure when I say his name and if I scratch him just right on the back of his neck, he starts grooming himself manically. He loves to play with the tabs you pull off the top of a bottle of milk, and will even mock fight you for them (his growling used to crack my brother up. The two of them engaged in many mock-milk-top-battles).

As Rupert has gotten older, his medical problems have increased. First it was feline acne, which would cause his face to swell up most unbecomingly. Then feline asthma was added to the mix, making him wheeze and cough like an old man. A few years ago he was diagnosed with mega-colon, a condition that causes him to get blocked up and requires daily medication (a laxative) with his food to keep the plumbing working properly.

Another medical blow was delivered last week. About a month ago, Rupert's back foot began to swell up. At first I thought it was a bug bite. He’s had swelling reactions to those before, and usually some oral Prednisone helps them go away. But this time it didn’t work. Then I began soaking the foot and prodding around to see if there was a bite wound or some other injury. I could find nothing, but the foot continued to swell. Friday, I took Rupert in to the vet and got the bad news. Rupert has a tumor on his back foot. While it’s pretty big and ugly, it doesn't seem to be giving him any pain. He's not limping, he doesn't flinch when I touch his foot, and he's eating and playing around normally. We don't know if the tumor is malignant or not, but pretty much the only treatment is to amputate the foot. Which there is no way in hell I am going to do. Rupert is 14 years old, and the thought of him going through the pain of an amputation and living out his remaining few years with a missing foot just seems wrong. Plus, if it is cancer, he'd have to go through chemo in addition to the amputation, which would be even worse. I just can’t see putting him through that, especially given all his other medical conditions. For now, he is his usual happy self, playing, eating and drinking normally, with an enlarged back foot. I guess we'll reassess if it starts to cause him pain, but until then, I'm going to let things ride. Hopefully the tumor is benign and will stay localized, adding to his freakish appearance while not being life-threatening. Only time will tell.

It’s been a long week. Within hours after getting home from “Wicked,” I was struck with a fever and chest congestion. The fever lasted for 2.5 days and I am only now starting to get over the cold. I stayed home for much of last week, in bed recovering. But, during that time, I made a few interesting observations.

The first is that daytime T.V. absolutely stinks. Truly, there is nothing on. If it wasn’t for the Masterpiece Theatre miniseries of “Jane Eyre” I had on DVD (thank you Netflix), I would have gone insane.

The second observation, as this post title suggests, is that cats don’t like black olives. Jeff loves making pizza from scratch. And since Friday was his birthday and I was too sick to really do anything special for him, he made a couple of pizzas for the family. Salami and black olive, and this Italian dried beef and black olive (both were excellent, BTW). While cleaning up the dinner dishes, I missed a little ramikin of black olives, which were left sitting on the counter overnight. Our cats, little scavengers that they are, couldn’t help but investigate these curious black orbs and attempt to eat one. What I found in the ramikin this morning was an olive with the impression of cat teeth on either side. The other 3 olives were left untouched. I smiled as an image of Oona (our tabby and the most likely culprit), eagerly picking up the olive with her teeth came to mind. I could just imagine a look of feline disgust come over her face as she opened her mouth and let the olive fall back into the bowl, discarded as unworthy of consumption. After finding and eating half a poppy-seed muffin the other day, the black olive must have been quite a disappointment for her.

The final observation made this week is that my son can relate anything to "Star Wars." Anything. A mundane conversation about something that happened during our day will prompt him to say, “It’s like in 'The Clone Wars' when …” or, “That’s like what happened in 'Star Wars' when….” This morning, Eamon was going on and on about something and Jeff made his standard “That’s neat Eamon” reply. Eamon then said, “I hate when he does that.” I looked at him and asked, “Oh, really?” To which the boy replied, “Uh huh! It’s like in 'Star Wars, Episode 2,' when Obi-wan tells Anakin to stop and he doesn’t, and Obi-wan says, ‘I hate when he does that.’” God help me, am I raising a future Star Wars Convention attendee? Is he going to start dressing in Jedi robes and learn how to speak Huttese? While I think it’s great that the boy is so passionate about “Star Wars,” I’m thinking we may want to begin directing his attention to other areas as well.

Things began to go a bit better today. It's not that any problems at school were resolved - far from it. But I've kind of graduated into the "acknowledge and move on" phase. Sure there are things about education that suck, and I may not stay in this profession forever. But while I’m at it, I’ve got to do the best job possible and try to keep the complaints to a minimum. They don’t really change anything anyway (but it does feel good to vent sometimes).

So now, the kids are in bed, Jeff just left to meet with a client, and I’m about to settle down to an evening of “Survivor” and knitting. But I thought I’d check on Rupert (my cat) first. I heard some hacking noises upstairs and wanted to make sure the poor guy was feeling OK. I hunkered down next to him and began petting his chin, just the way he likes it. He lifted his head, in what I thought was feline bliss... and then proceeded to projectile vomit all over my hand.

It was not pleasant. In fact, I almost got sick right along with him.

*sigh* I need to remember my mantra: Acknowledge and move on.... Acknowledge and move on....

And I'm going to do that. As soon as I'm done cleaning up the mess.