04/09/2023
I really don’t check this page much anymore, but we are now six (cats). It’s been a while and I’m sorry I didn’t post the sooner, but on November 26, 2022, we lost Olivette, the mother of the four kittens, to mammary cancer.
This is what happens when people are irresponsible, don’t fix their kitties when they’re younger, and let them out to do whatever for however long and have however many litters until one day they show up on your back deck as a stray, hungry and cold, and eventually obviously pregnant.
I estimated that she was at least seven years old at the time because her kittens were a year younger. The vet said she’s probably much older than that but it’s hard to tell.
God knows how many litters of kittens she’d had before she showed up on my deck.
God knows how she avoided getting a pyometra.
But, I finally did get her spayed, after years of building her trust, and it was at her spay that we discovered the lumps.
The upside was, she was much calmer, and she became more affectionate once the hormones died down. She took naps in my lap for long periods of time and enjoyed sitting calmly by the window sniffing the air all summer and watching the world go by.
I like to think that she was thankful for having some peace of mind, because she had been so feral, so afraid, and so hormonal that she really wasn’t happy for a long time.
I’d like to think that she had some happiness in her final months, finally enjoying being a lap cat, and I was with her when she left this world.
My biggest regret is that I waited so long to spay her, knowing full well what the risk was; because I missed out on more time with the delightful cat that she was once she was spayed.
Then again, surgery like that can sometimes wake up things that were lying dormant, things like cancer cells that hadn’t yet decided to grow. There is always a possibility that had she been spayed earlier, I would’ve also lost her earlier if the surgery had activated the cancer.
One can never know except in hindsight.
I learned a lot from her though, knowledge I will take with me into the future. She was an excellent little orange and white cat, I miss her yodels and I miss her little white feet, her little toes.
The rest of us are so far thank goodness healthy, the kittens will be seven on the 20th, Tallulah will be nine, and Maeve is probably a senior in her teens but we just don’t pay attention to age.
So that’s the update, which came after spending most of the evening adjusting all of the settings to ensure that my page is no longer a spam fest. Hope you all are doing well.
