Meow Monday

Back in January, we went on a 5 day trip to Victoria, British Columbia. Our cat, Moe, has asthma, and he requires a twice daily preventative inhaler. We had a friend come to feed and check on the other cats while we were gone, but I didn't want to ask someone to come over twice a day just to give a cat an inhaler. Instead I wanted to board him at our vet. However, Mr. V decided that it would be cheaper and easier to just bring him along with us (and he also admitted that he misses the cats when he's away from them). Needless to say, Moe became our first cat to become an international traveler. So if anyone wants to know who the real crazy cat person in this house is...don't point to me!

Here's Moe hanging out in our hotel room:

Meow Monday

I'm going to attempt to use this week to catch up on all the Friday Fill-Ins I've missed, and to finally talk about some of the adventures we've had over the past few months. But for now, I've decided to turn Monday's into "Meow Mondays". I have a new camera that I'm still in the process of mastering, so the cats have been my unwilling practice subjects for the past few weeks.

Petsmart Halloween

This has become an annual tradition for us, and if you think we're crazy - too bad :-).

A few years ago a local pet store in Corpus Christi asked us to enter their annual pet costume contest. We shopped there all the time and it sounded cute and fun, so we entered, and won 2nd place. We took home a bag of rabbit supplies (I had dressed our 4 rabbits up as the characters from the Wizard of Oz) worth at least $100. Once we realized we could win money we set out for 2 more contests in town - winning 1st place and a $50 gift certificate at one of them, and 3rd place a box of pet supplies worth about $50 from another one. In total we won about $200 worth of animal supplies and in a large animal household, any money or free stuff is always welcome and appreciated!

So for the past few years we have been taking the cats (and rabbits, though 3 of them have died, leaving me with only one character from the Wizard of Oz left). Each year we've won something. We've never won as much as that first year, but I've found that most people dress up their dogs and are shocked to see cats and rabbits in costumes. I think thats what helps us win - we're different from the rest.

This past weekend we took the cats to the Petsmart Halloween contest and walked out of there with 3 cute pictures, and 3rd place with a huge bag of Greenies treats. Greenies are pretty expensive and this bag is huge, so once again, we were happy with our prize :-).

We couldn't take all of the cats because some of them won't tolerate a costume for even 2 seconds, but we packed up the ones who were semi-well behaved and this is what we got. They all look so thrilled....

Meet Moe

Moe has appeared in a few other blog posts of mine - here and here - and now he needs any good vibes, prayers and thoughts that you can spare.

Moe started out as a foster kitten, and was then adopted by a friend of mine. When Moe decided to start violently attacking his former best friend (Larry, the cat), he came to live with me for a while. My friend and I tried to reintroduce him to Larry, in the hopes that they would eventually get along, but we were unsuccessful after several attempts and we failed. (side note: I am NOT a person who likes when people just give up pets, but this was a weird circumstance. I've never seen cats fight the way Larry and Moe were fighting, and with a 10 month old baby in the house who often ended up underneath their fights, this just wasn't working out.)

So Moe has come back to live in the V household permanently. I suppose I have the option of bringing him back to the vet that I first fostered him for, but that would require him living in a cage in the vet's waiting room, hoping that someone will adopt a full grown cat. Plus, he's been back and forth between my house and my friend's house several times, and he already seems confused about what's going on, so I wasn't about to relocate him again.

A few days ago, Moe had a horrible coughing fit. Since I've only heard one of my cats cough once before, and it was just one single cough, I started googling "feline cough". His fit was enough to have me worried because on top of the fact that he was coughing, he also seemed like he couldn't breathe. An hour or so of googling led me to the conclusion that a coughing cat is bad...really bad. Every single thing I read about it, said that the cat would need medical attention ASAP. So the next day we went off to the vet. I had started to suspect asthma, based on my readings and some videos I watched of cats having asthma attacks, and the vet confirmed my suspicions. However, asthma isn't the only cause of coughing in cats. There are several other things that could cause it...the worst one being heart disease.

If you remember back in May, I wrote a blog about my cat Meepers. Meepers had died from what we suspect was undiagnosed heart disease. When he died, I did a lot of research on heart disease in cats, and its a very, very scary thing. It often goes undiagnosed, and when its finally noticed, its often too late. So of course, since heart disease could be the cause of Moe's coughing, I was worried.

The vet listened to his heart and thankfully didn't hear anything wrong with it. A murmur or an irregular beat could be indicative of a heart problem. Unfortunately though, NOT hearing one of these things doesn't necessarily mean that his heart is ok. She also took some x-rays, and sent them off to a radiologist for analysis. Her suspicion was asthma, but the radiologist was the one who would really be able to read the x-rays.

Yesterday, I got some possible bad news, and I'm now a nervous wreck. The vet called me back and told me that the radiologist definitely confirmed asthma from the x-rays. This obviously isn't good, but its treatable. However, the vet also noticed that his heart was slightly enlarged. And having an enlarged heart is just not good obviously. Now Moe has to go back in for some more tests.

Its very possible that the asthma has caused the enlarged heart, but a more probable diagnosis is that he has some form of heart disease AND asthma. Apparently, the two often go hand in hand.

So now I'm playing the waiting game. When this holiday weekend is over, I have to schedule more tests for him and talk with the vet about getting him on an asthma regimen. And I'm hoping, praying and wishing that he doesn't have heart disease.

Heart disease is the #1 cause of sudden death in cats and that's what terrifies me the most. Meepers acted perfectly normal, and then an hour later he collapsed and died. I'm terrified that I'll have to experience that again with Moe. There's medicine to treat heart disease in cats, but its really something that seems to be hit or miss. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

The absolute best case scenario here is that his enlarged heart has been caused by the asthma, and once the asthma is under control, then his heart will be fine. So if anyone can spare some thoughts, prayers, or good vibes, please send them my way. I don't think I can handle losing another cat to heart disease, this soon after losing Meepers to the same thing. :-(

Week in Review

Its hard to not love Washington at this time of the year. The only thing I still have trouble wrapping my mind around is the fact that many people here think that the months of miserable weather, are worth it, just to be here for the approximate 2 months of nice weather in the summer. I can't argue with the fact that its beautiful here in the summer. I just think I'd rather take a vacation here in the summer instead of suffering through 10 months of miserable rain, fog, gray skies, 9:30am sunrises and 3:30pm sunsets, just to be here for the nice summer (which isn't 2 full months of niceness - if you look at some of the pictures I'm posting in this blog, you'll see that we're actually in jackets and sweatshirts in some of them).

I'm always amazed at the fact that whenever Mr. V leaves for a while, I go through the same pattern. First, I'm miserable and lonely, but then I quickly get into a new routine. Since he's wasn't the only one from the squadron gone, the other wives and I are always quick to make ourselves busy, which is easy to do during a beautiful Washington summer.

Sunday: The week started out on a scary note. Finding a black widow spider in my bathroom on Sunday morning was not how I thought my day was going to start, so that thoroughly freaked me out. Now I just have to hope that there aren't more of them living in my house, and that the cats will stay away from them if there are.

Monday: Monday was pretty entertaining. Several weeks ago, a friend of mine had her Ipod stolen out of her car, that was parked in her driveway. Within a few nights of that happening, several other people in her neighborhood also had Ipods and GPS systems stolen from their cars. The neighbors all reported the thefts, but the cops that came to check up on things didn't seem to be too interested in catching whoever was doing this, so no one thought anything would come of it. Well, it turns out that the kid who was stealing from cars, got a little too confident and decided to try shoplifting from the Kmart in town, which got him arrested. From what we can understand, he was arrested because of his Kmart shoplifting, and then they figured out that he was also the Ipod thief. So my friend and her neighbors had to write victim statements, and deliver them to the county courthouse if they wanted money for their stolen property. My friend also wanted to go see this kid's arraignment, and I went along with her so I could take her 18 month old son out of the courtroom if he started to get fussy. She didn't want to miss a minute of this guy's testimony.

The entertaining part of the whole day was juvenile court itself. We were shocked at how these kids came dressed. Apparently, its appropriate to show up in court wearing pants that are falling off your butt, with your boxers showing. Because, you know, thats clearly going to make a good impression on the judge. Thats pretty much what every kid looked like, minus the one and only kid who showed up in a suit and tie.

Not only were the kids inappropriately dressed for court, but the Ipod thief was arraigned on several charges, all of which he pleaded "not guilty" to, which definitely irritated my friend (her Ipod was her first ever mother's day gift, so aside from it being expensive, it also had sentimental value to her).

I think the final kicker of the day was the conversation we heard outside of the courtroom between the prosecutor, a juvenile delinquent, his mother and his lawyer. The prosecutor was explaining what was going to happen in the courtroom, and the mother kept interrupting saying "my son is NOT guilty" in a voice way too obnoxious to ever be taken seriously. Then when the lawyer told the kid to spit his gum out because the judge didn't like people chewing gum while talking to him, the kid said "Oh its ok. The last time I was here I just hid it under my tongue." Something about the mother's attitude, the fact that this kid nonchalantly admitted that this was not his first time in juvenile court, and the fact that the Ipod thief, with piles of evidence against him, pleaded not guilty to all accounts, just made it a very entertaining, yet disturbing, day as a whole.

Tuesday: Tuesday was pretty uneventful. I spent a lot of time working around the house, and playing with my new dustbuster, which is a purchase I should have made years ago. I no longer have to lug around an entire vacuum clear just to suck up some stray cat fur and litter tracked outside of the boxes. Mr. V likes to do things cheaply, and so do I, so he's fine with lugging the large vacuum cleaner around if it saves us some money. I finally decided that he's the one who is always gone, and I'm the one who cleans the house most of the time, so I didn't care if I had to spend more money. I was buying the dustbuster to make things much easier to accomplish for me.

That afternoon, I brought Moe, back to my friend's house. Remember my foster kittens from last summer? If you go back to that blog post, Moe is the little one climbing up my leg in one of the pictures. When I had the foster kittens, I also had Larry, a cat I was babysitting for the length of the deployment for a friend, while she went home to Indiana. Larry loved Moe. He followed him around and mothered him, and was pretty obsessed with him, so when the kittens went up for adoption, my friend adopted Moe so that Larry would have a friend.

Fast forward to several months ago. Suddenly Moe decided that he had had enough of Larry and started violently attacking him, in the vicinity of my friend's 8 month old daughter. My friend obviously didn't want her baby injured, so she panicked a little, and I took Moe back from her. This was around the time when Moe had reached the age of needing to be neutered, so I took him and got him neutered for her, and we hoped that his hormones would calm down a bit, and it would be possible to reintroduce him to Larry.

The first reintroduction didn't go well. So I kept him longer, in the hopes that we could reintroduce them as two new cats, instead of cats that already knew each other. The idea was to try to make them forget about each other, then let them hiss and growl at each other for a few days, then hopefully they would adapt, and Larry would start to stand up for himself a little more. This is the point we're at now. So far, the second re-introduction hasn't gone well, but we're giving it a few more days before giving up for good, and just letting Moe come live with me for the rest of his life.(He looks sweet and innocent doesn't he?)

Wednesday: Wednesday was one of those days that I love in Washington. Absolutely perfect beautiful weather. So a group of friends and I headed to one of the beaches in town to hang out. Even though the weather was nice, the beaches here aren't really swimming beaches. Most of them have rocks instead of sand. A few beaches have sand, like the one we went to this day, but the water temperature is still way too cold to actually swim in it. The ladies who had dogs, brought them along, and we spent a while just playing with the dogs and soaking up some sun. I actually had a slight sunburn when I came home, which was slightly shocking, because I think its the first time I've been burnt like that since moving up here. Typically, I burn pretty easily, so that should tell you something about the lack of sunlight here and/or the lack of nice days that I can spend outside.

Thursday: Thursday was spent on my new favorite hobby - geocaching! Apparently, this is something thats been pretty popular for years now, but the first time I ever heard of it was a week ago. Our spouse club set up a geocaching hike, which I went on, because I was bored and it sounded interesting. If you haven't heard of it before, basically you get coordinates, and use a GPS to locate a cache at the location given. The caches range in size from micro to large, and they have been placed there by random people. There is an official website - Geocaching: The Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site - where you can look up your area and find where the caches are in that area. So last week, I went on my first geocaching hike, and this past Thursday a couple friends and I set off to find the caches that we couldn't find the week before.

(Melanie with a micro cache - the cache was the size of a finger nail and this piece of paper was rolled up in side of it for people to write their names on.)

(Allison and Karin [and Elaina]) with another cache)

Thursday afternoon was the highlight of my week. The week before I had gone with a friend to look at a dog at the local animal shelter. Everyone who knows me knows that I love cats, so of course, when I walked into that shelter I wanted to take every single cat home with me. I resisted though, until we walked into the 2nd shelter (there are 2 locations on the island). There I found a little gray kitten that looked and acted just like Cledus, my kitten who died from leukemia about 3 years ago. I've truly believe that if an animal is meant to come into your life, they will. So while looking at all the cats, I felt sorry for all of them, and I wanted to save them all, but I didn't feel a strong connection with any of them until I saw little Emily. When I went to pet her, she started purring loudly, and she screamed for me when I eventually walked away. I obviously know that she's not Cledus, but she is just so much like him, that I actually cried when I left the shelter. Mr. V was gone, so I texted him to tell him about her. I expected an argument from him, but instead he texted back "Go ahead and adopt her". Even from far away he could already tell that there was something special about her! So I adopted her the next day, but I couldn't take her home until she was spayed, which is why I picked her up on Thursday afternoon. She fit into this house instantly, and Mr. V fell in love with her as soon as he walked in the door yesterday. She's exactly like Cledus, and its almost scary. She definitely has her own personality, but there is so much Cledus in her, which I can't help but love! We changed her name to Angelina, because she's like an angel of Cledus :-). Some people are probably going to think that we're crazy for getting another cat. But we realized a while ago that we have the means to take proper care of 10 cats, and when Meepers died back in April, that left us with 9. Mr. V had said at the time, that we'll know it, when we're meant to have another cat, and I truly believe that little Angelina was the cat that was meant to fill that empty spot in our home!

(the resident cats checking out the new arrival)

(Angelina - her ear is green because its ink from a tattoo that is now wearing off. She wasn't so sure about this house at first, but it only took her about 10 minutes before she was bouncing around like she owned the place!)

Friday: Another geocaching day! This time we went to a park up in Anacortes, the town on the island just north of Whidbey. It was freezing on this day though, but we still had a lot of fun.

(The first cache we found)

(View from Washington Park)

(View from Washington Park)

(Karin and me where we found the 2nd cache. We thought this was pretty cool - this area was carved by an ancient glacier.)

(The 2nd cache of the day)

(Our self portrait of us with the 2nd cache)

Saturday: We ended the week on a fun note. The show Deadliest Catch is pretty popular around here because some of the boats are based out of Seattle, and 2 of the guys from the boat the Northwestern live in Anacortes (again -the town directly north of where I live). I have to admit that I don't watch the show, other than stopping on it while I channel surf occasionally, but my friend is obsessed with the show, so when she heard that some of the guys would be at the Market in Anacortes signing autographs as part of a fundraiser (Jake Anderson's father disappeared several months ago and they were raising funds to continue searching for him), we of course had to head up there to meet them.

(Nick Mavar,me, Karin & Elaina, Captain Jonathan Hillstrand, Jake Anderson)

And that concludes my week! Very busy, but very fun!

Rest in Peace Meepers

On April 27th we lost an important member of our family. Our 2 year old cat Meepers died very suddenly and very unexpectedly. Mr. V and I took his death pretty hard, and just over a week later, we still miss him more than ever.

Meepers was the only cat that we had from the very first day he was born. Back in Jacksonville we trapped his mother, a semi-feral cat, and she gave birth to him about a week later. She was a young cat, who didn't know what to do with her baby, so when he was born Mr. V was the one who had to cut the umbilical cord and bottle feed him to supplement the lack of nursing he was getting from his mother. He was the only kitten in the litter, and as soon as he was born, his mother tried to get away from him. There's just no possible way that he would have ever been able to survive in the Florida swamps alone like that so I take comfort in knowing that we gave him a life that he never would have had elsewhere. He probably would have died on the same day that he was born.

Out of all of our cats, Meepers was definitely the most spoiled. When he was born I had read articles about kittens that are the only child. Everything I read said that they actually function a lot like humans that are only children. They didn't have litter mates to socialize and play with, so they liked to be alone a lot. Even though we had other cats in the house, Meepers was definitely an only child. Once we moved to Washington he claimed our office as his room. We keep this room cat free, but Meepers was allowed in. He would meep at the door to let us know he wanted to go in, and he would meep loudly when he wanted to go out (can you tell we were original with his name? He always meeped and never meowed.) He spent most of his days just sleeping in a patch of sun in the room. He did get along with the other cats, but he spent most of his time in that room just happily enjoying his life and his time away from the other cats.

He was also pretty spoiled and looking back now, I'm glad that we spoiled him. He was the only one Mr. V tolerated on the counters. He got to eat our table scraps. He got one on one attention from us when he was in the office and we were sitting at the computer. As I'm typing this now, I miss having him sitting in my lap here purring.

About 2 weeks ago we noticed that Meepers seemed lethargic. Since that's never a good sign with cats we took him to the emergency vet. There he had x-rays taken and the vet suspected heart disease, but couldn't be sure with just the x-rays. She recommended a follow up appointment with our regular vet and a possible visit to a cardiologist. The x-rays also showed that he was constipated, and a urine test showed he had a UTI, so we assumed that was the reason for the lethargy. She sent us home with some medicine and everything seemed ok for the moment.

That weekend we went on a short vacation to the Olympic Peninsula and Meepers came with us. He seemed to be having a blast spending time with just us and no other cats. He seemed to get better with each day that passed. The day after we got home from the trip, I took him in for his follow up appointment with his regular vet. That's when we got some bad news. This vet couldn't detect any heart problems, but he did an ultrasound of his kidneys and diagnosed polycystic kidney disease. PKD is a degenerative disease that has no cure. I was devastated. However, with a special prescription food and medicine cats with PKD can live many years past their initial diagnosis. Its basically a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off, but no one has any idea when it will. So we went home with this news.

Over the next week Meepers acted even better. He loved his new food and he was playing and acting completely normal again. Then on the 27th, I took him back for another follow up appointment. The doctor was supposed to look at his kidneys again and figure out what was going on. The week before he was still on some antibiotics so he waited until everything was better before really taking a look at the kidneys.

And thats when it happened. Everything was fine that morning. He played. He ate. He drank. He used the litter box. Then we got to the vet. Within minutes of putting me in an exam room, my poor little Meepers made a horrible sound, and just collapsed and died. It happened so fast. No more than 15 seconds could have gone by. The vets and vet techs were fantastic though. They moved fast and tried to revive him, but they were unsuccessful. I didn't understand what happened. I was crying. And of course it figured that Mr. V had had his flights canceled for about a week straight, and that day he was flying.

The vet came in to talk to me and told me that the only thing that could have caused this was his heart. The emergency vet must have been right in suspecting heart disease, but its so hard to see and diagnose. He talked with me for a while, and I learned that even if we had known, there would have been nothing that we could have done. Heart disease is the cause of 90% of all sudden deaths in cats. It was slightly comforting to read that collapsing and dying that quickly is pretty standard with this disease.

I guess I was just shocked because I had expected his kidneys to kill him eventually, but I NEVER thought that he would die that quickly and from something other than his kidneys. I'm thankful that it happened at the vet though because I don't know how I would have handled that if I had been home alone with him.

I think the saddest, yet happiest thing for me is that it seems clear that Meepers was never meant to live in the first place. I mean look at the facts. His mother tried to abandon him moments after he was born. He had kidney disease. He had heart disease. The poor little guy was so sick right from the beginning and we never knew it. In fact, until a few weeks ago we thought that he was actually our healthiest cat. But I guess we gave him 2 happy years of life. At least he got to live a life at all, and I like to think that he was happy with us.

I read that cats with HCM (the heart disease that he had) live an average of 736 days. That breaks down into 2 years and 1 week. Meepers was exactly 2 years, 1 month and 1 day old.

I miss him so much and so does Mr. V. We had him cremated and tomorrow afternoon I have to go pick up his ashes and I am dreading that because I know its really going to become real at that point. He was our little buddy. He was our baby - the only cat we had from the day he arrived in this world.

So to honor him, here are some pictures of our little boy Meepers:

(one day old)

(one week old)

(a rare occasion - snuggling with his mom)

(baby Meepers)

(sorry for the picture of my butt but I always thought it was cute when he laid like this)

(always a new way to be comfortable)

(hide and seek)

(sleeping Meepers)

(I always thought he had an angry old man face :-))

(this is where he hung out every night while I got ready for bed)

(another angry old man look)

(teenage Meepers exploring the outdoors for the first time)

(He was an inside only cat, but since he was born inside, we took him out one day, and this was the first time he ever saw what outside was)

(yes we're those people...we had a birthday party for him. And I'm glad we did - it was his last birthday :'-()

(relaxing after his birthday)