The Sad News

We let go of another of our Hungry Hairy Horde. Calamity Jane, aka Callie, died Wednesday afternoon after a long long illness at the ripe old age of 16. Callie (and her brother, Pav) came to us in 1993 when they were about 6wks old. They were little firecrackers! We went to a friend’s house and put them (the kittens, not the friend) in a crate and put it in the back seat where Zeus also was. They hissed at him and scared the beejeebers out of him! He jumped into the front seat where he refused to move. We finally had to pull over so Lorna could sit in the back without this huge dog on her lap. From then on, Zeus did not like kittens. He never ever tried to hurt them but he would run as fast as he could in the opposite direction. This the dog who killed huge groundhogs. When they grew up, both cats thought Zeus was the greatest thing since the can opener and pop-top canned cat food.

But I digress, as usual.

Those of you who are owned by cats know that while they profess to be graceful deities, cats can be rather klutzy. Like falling off the back of couches. 99.5% of cats will come out from behind the couch with this look of “I meant to do that.” Our Callie was one of those .5% of cats who came rushing out saying “Did you see what I just did?! Wasn’t that funny?!”

We live in a swamp of sorts and have lots of frogs in the stream behind the house. Other cats catch the frogs without getting more than a little damp on their paws. Not our Callie. She’d be wet and/or mud covered from the belly down and not see a thing wrong with it.

Other cats would come in from the rain with just a few drops of water on them, perhaps more on their feet. Not our Callie. We used to keep a towel at the back door to dry her off after a rain.

The first thing both of us will remember the most about Callie is her purr. Some cats will purr just a short while then stop. Not Callie. Our nighttime joke was “don’t touch her! she’ll start purring and we’ll never get to sleep!” followed by “too late”. She’d purr for a very very long time. Loudly. In Lorna’s ear.

Callie liked to keep the dogs in line. She had this look that stopped them in their tracks. She demanded respect or else. One of her favorite games with the dogs was to lay smack dab in the middle of a dog bed.

Callie grew into this meditative, contemplative, funny little cat. She calmed down over the years and became quite wise. She connected with Lorna the most (all of our cats did) and used to tell Lorna these short Zen lessons. “Yes, we are the same.” is the one Lorna will remember the most.

Callie had a chronic ear problem that a few years ago we found out was this huge mass in her ear. During the long process of getting it to shrink and get her ear healthy, we also found out she had hyperthyroid (same as her brother). By the time her ear mass had shrank, her thyroid levels made it unsafe to do surgery to remove it. The levels stayed somewhat close to norm until about a year ago when they started to climb. A test last month revealed it had jumped to 18. Normal is 1-4 and her highest up to that point had been 8-10. We switched medication and it dropped to 14. High levels such as this usually means cancer.

Meanwhile, we saw she was drooling an awful lot and the vet found a huge mass under her tongue. Again, probably cancer due to its location, shape, and size. This made it very painful for this starving cat to eat. Pain meds, anti-biotics, increased thyroid med, etc enabled her to eat soft food. And she ate a lot although she was barely 7lbs.

Then Monday Callie became unable to eat at all. She’d become more and more frantic about food. She was possessed by her hunger and now, once again, she couldn’t eat. No matter what we tried, she just couldn’t eat. Wednesday she was all over me, something she’d not done in a long time, demanding to be fed. I tried many times throughout the day to find something she would/could eat.

We’d been discussing if it were getting to be time to let her go. If it were just the thyroid or just the ear mass or just the mouth mass, we’d work with her and the vets to get it fixed. But the combination of that and her age (and she also had high blood pressure) made it such a risk. The last time we had taken her to the vet, we had discussed doing a biopsy of the mass in her mouth which would mean putting her under. Again, if it had just been that, it would have been worth the risk.

We sat with Callie in the exam room. We already knew what we should do. But we wanted her opinion. The thing was, there was still that bright light in her eyes. That energy that is our soul was so strong still! How could we snuff that out? Callie’s lesson of “Yes, we are the same.” came to Lorna then and reminded us that it wouldn’t be snuffed out, but rather released from the bonds of the physical cage that is her old body. So we sat there, asking Callie what she thought. She wandered out of the crate and looked around. Went onto the sink and sniffed the treat bottle. Then came back to the table and flopped down, classic Callie-style. And she was calm. I’d been with her all day and she’d been this frantic, driven, consumed, possessed monster. Now she was calmly laying there, purring softly. She’d given us her opinion.

Our usual vet wasn’t there but the vet that helped us was very kind, very considerate. We brought Callie home and put her next to her brother near Fort Rooster.

So, yes, they are the same. Their souls are no different from ours. Callie is free, chasing butterflies with Zeus, hissing at her brother, laying next to Skiz, and rubbing up against Sparky.

For those of you keeping count, that leaves us with one cat, Sassafras, and the 5 dogs (Casey, PopCorn, Joella, Sam, and Mike). When Mike is older, we will probably take in a mother cat as a foster and keep two of her kittens. I’m not much of a cat person but I do like having them around.