Sorry for the lack of blogs recently, but I’ve been terribly sick.  But it’s time to purge some thoughts…

Those of you that have read Soul Sketches have a firm grip on the fact that I am very sentimental and soft hearted.  I’m also an animal lover, and tonight my heart is very heavy since we had to say goodbye to our cat Cassie.  She was 17 years old and an absolute joy, truly a one-of-a-kind cat.

We got Cassie 8 years ago, rescuing her from the local humane society where she was a mere 3 days away from being euthanized to make room for more cats.  She was 9 years old, much older than all the other cats, and was fairly anti-social, laying in her box with her back to the room, pretty much ignoring everyone.  She caught our attention because she was so much older.

Once we got her out of her cage, we noticed that she was polydactyl, which made her that much more special to us.

When we got her home and got to know her, we discovered evidence that she had been abused in her earlier years.  She had, of all things, tattoos on her.  She had a date in one ear, which we eventually assumed to be her birth month and year, and had some symbol tattooed in her other ear.  Then we found some other symbol tattooed on her belly.  This horrified us, thinking how awful it must have been to be a kitten and have some loud tattoo gun painfully putting marks in each ear and on her belly.  And also to think of how she must have been painfully restrained for this to happen.

We also noticed her right front leg moved and looked differently from her left.  It appeared at some point her leg had been broken or dislocated, but she had found a way to make it work for her, and she had an interesting swinging action she did with that leg to walk.

So we had a special cat on our hands with special needs.  She was a bush dweller, so she never jumped up on counters or tables.  She usually never jumped on a couch or chair first, you typically had to invite her up.  She didn’t like to be picked up at all, and would rather sit by you than climb on you.  She was very vocal and had a lot of calls that she would issue at various times of the day.

One of the wildest things that developed with her was her water drinking habits.  One day I had left a cup of water on the floor by me, and she came over and sniffed at it.  Watching her size it up, I told Lori that I thought she was going to take a drink out of it.  Sure enough, she stuck her head in it and drank for quite some time.  From that point on, we made sure that we always had a cup like that of water in that same spot, and it was her treat.  She usually sang one of her calls when she was getting ready to drink from that cup.  I decided that call was her “water song”.

As she aged we went through several health issues with her, but she always came back in fine shape.  However such was not the case most recently, beginning a couple of weeks ago.  She was having a few issues that sounded like she had a pretty solid cold.  So we took her in to be checked and got some meds for her.  Soon after that, we noticed that her tail had gone completely limp, and that she appeared to have no control over it.  That concerned us, so we took her back in to be checked.  The vets couldn’t find any evidence of injury but were quite concerned as well.  They also kept her over a couple of nights, noting that she had several issues including being dehydrated, which seemed weird considering all the fresh water she drinks from the cup I mentioned.

We got her back home, and were continuing to pump medicine into her.  Then suddenly one morning, while I was feeling so sick, Lori noticed that Cassie had lost the use of her back legs.  Her muscle mass had disintegrated almost overnight, and she also had no control over her bodily functions.  She ran Cassie over to the vet, and he said it appeared to be a degenerative neurological thing.  That was a serious blow.  We knew time was limited, although we didn’t speak much of it.

Finally, today, while I was still home sick from work, the whole situation became worse, as she tried to move around and would get stuck.  Plus she was holed up in one room, as we feared that she would fall down the stairs if she got out of that room.  Her calls became more like cries, and we knew that this may be it.

We took her over to the vet, and in the midst of the discussion, it became clear that now was the time to make the hard decision.  She had lost the use of her legs, and her muscle mass would never return.  So she would never walk again.  Her loss of bodily function was so obvious.  She was wetting all over herself, and didn’t even know she was defecating at one point.  Plus I noticed that her urine was missing that strong ammonia smell, indicating that something may be wrong with her kidneys, if she could even feel them.

She had been such a good, sweet, loving cat, we knew it was not right to make her linger under such circumstances, especially since it was going to get worse as a degenerative thing.  We couldn’t do that to her.  We knew it was time to let her go.  It hurt terribly, but we knew it was time.

So our sweet loving cat Cassie is now departed, and it’s a hard thing to deal with.  We hope she knew how much we loved her, and we hope that her 8 years here at this home were better than her first 9 years.  We will miss her for a long time.

Thanks for reading…