The Bad Week

As if it were not enough to lose Honey and Poppy, old Gretal went also.

I suppose for both Poppy and Gretal this could be seen as a blessing.

Both suffered long term chronic ailments.  In Gretal's case, it was ibs.

She had lost weight and lately had taking to crying out a lot, as if in pain.  She'd fallen off the cat run three days before her death so I wonder if that caused it or contributed.  I'd also just given her the monthly cortisone injection for her ibs, a few days before I found her cold and crying, in a carrier, unable to move.  The day before, she'd been eating as usual and sleeping in the window.

She's always was the first out to eat once I'm up, since she has been toothless for years too, and when she wasn't, I went looking and found her, in that carrier, near death.  It was early early morning.  I pulled her out and onto a heating pad and gave her warm fluids and some Karo on her gums but nothing helped and she died in my arms less than an hour after I found her.

I cried and cried and rocked her and questioned myself but knew it was a blessing, that she'd been going downhill for some time.

 I'd talked to my brother again.  He and his wife were exhausted.  Her mother finally died of a long battle with several types of cancer.  The last days were horrific both said and they said nobody should go through that.  There is no sense to prolonged suffering.

Drink the Kool Aid instead, I think to myself but I"m not in that position yet.  I'm sure soon it will be my turn.  Maybe then I'll want to lay in bed a year or two, getting bed sores, moaning in pain and misery, wetting and soiling myself, until finally....finally....its over.

It's been very wet here, to say the least.  We needed rain and we got rain and a lot of it.

I hope there is a reprieve today for a bit of trapping for Monday's clinic.  I've got seven reservations and intend to fill them, if possible.  These kitties, six in all, are in Lebanon, in an area with a lot of cats who need fixed.

Gretal was a teen when I trapped her back in 2006, along highway 34, with her brother.   I didn't know the woman in the old house then and that she fed a lot of unfixed cats, and that likely these were two of them.  After she left that house, and now its just a shell and falling away more each month, I got all those cats trapped and fixed and she took some of them back in where she lives now, down in Brownsville.   When I spotted the orange tabby and Gretal, the torti,  they were walking the shoulder of highway 34, looked like they were trying to hold one another up, and it was freezing with high winds.

Gretal as a skinny sick teen, not long after I trapped her in 2006

I spent three days after them then, in that freezing storm, mostly crouched in my car along the highway there.  They were both really sick with giardia and URI.

   Later on, I was evicted from the dump shack where I lived, in Corvallis.  I'd gotten a Salem woman to take in both Gretal and her brother, but she and her mom went on vacation for Christmas and deposited Gretal back on my doorstep just as I was in the horrendous exhaustion of trying to move.  I never spoke to her again, that woman, and Gretal stayed with me forever.

It was in 2011 she was drooling blood and pus, and a friend offered to take her to her own vet for dental care.  She also had bad earmites.  The vet called me, said she had terrible teeth and since she was feral, he wanted to kill her.  I was shocked that a vet would say such a thing and not just do his job.   I told him to do his job, he was being paid to do it, to pull her bad teeth and clean her ears out of mites.   I thought it got done and picked her up, but she was drooling pus again a week later.  I took her to a good vet then, who told me the teeth that had been "pulled" were really just broken off and her ears had not been cleaned and were full of mites. I seethed and seethed that first vet treated her that way and told my friend he should be reported but she wouldn't and later on she suffered further  with her own cats for making the wrong choice in vets.  After Gretal got good care, she thrived another seven years until the ibs and all its woes took her down.