Kylie the Kitty

Kylie the Kitty had quite a weekend, and I feel really badly about it. My parents had to put their 18-year-old cat Shady and 15-year-old black lab Jente to sleep in early January, leaving the 13-year-old sweet teddy-bear mutt Cody & the still-puppy-wild 6-year-old yellow lab Tule as the only animals. My mom would like to get another cat, but since we know Tule is such a wild one, my mom requested I bring Kylie when I visited this past weekend as a “test” since at least we knew Kylie can hold her own against other animals from her various growling and pouncing performances when she lived there for a year in 1997.

Well, Tule was even worse than we ever expected!

10 years ago this weekend was when my roommate found a black cat with green eyes meowing loudly & hiding from the rain in the parking lot near our apartment in Sacramento. My pet rat Gypsy had died a few months before, and my roommate knew I wanted a black cat with green eyes, so we both went back, armed with towels & deli meat in the drizzle. I coaxed her out from some bushes, picked her up in the towel & carried her across the street back to the apartment, getting gouged on my neck in the process – she still doesn’t like being held! She had no tags or collar & we never saw any lost cat signs around the area. She tried sleeping on top of my head that first night – the only time she’s ever done that. She did have to stay at my parents’ house for a year while I lived in San Jose & then in the UK, but otherwise, Kylie the Kitty has been my longest live-in relationship. 😉

I refuse to believe that she could be 12 or 13, or even 15, since she is still plenty spritely as she tears around the house, getting into everything just on principle. I call her Entropy Embodied, since that seems to be her calling…knocking down orderly piles of CDs, pulling books off bookshelves, tearing any & all paper to shreds, just because. She still talks more than any cat I’ve ever met, but I still don’t speak Cat fluently…you think I’d have caught on by now!

Kylie does have her own web page that is sadly out of date, so here are some more recent photos of her behind the link. No gray hairs yet, except for her one white whisker she has always had…

Happy Kylieversary!

Happy Holidays from Britta & Kylie at Festive Brittahytta!

For those of you who don’t know, because of her unrelenting tendencies to eliminate order wherever possible, knocking over CDs, pulling books out of bookshelves, clearing tables on a whim, for years I have nicknamed Kylie the Kitty “the Force of Entropy Embodied.” Last night, Kylie decided to bat my iPod off the table, where it landed smack on the tile floor. I tried turning it on, heard a nasty pop from inside, then horrible ugly grinding noises. Its disk is now dead and I have no iPod, let alone a pretty hand-painted teal 3G one that works with the accessories I have. ARGH! This is the most expensive thing she’s ever broken…and don’t even try to tell me “get an iPhone”…I’m not in the mood, thanks…

Now I’ll try to move on from how steam was coming out of my ears last night & have a better day…hope you all do too!

Good news is the Honda is fixed for only $100 for alignment and replacement tire rim…thank goodness! The BRIATA is still running fine…crossing my fingers it’ll stay that way for awhile…

Bad news is I haven’t felt this sick since I had pneumonia in 1998…blech! Sleeping so much & never feeling rested, coughing uncontrollably, sounding like a frog, waking up drenched in sweat. I’m going on day 6 of feeling horrible, and just started feeling almost human again last night so I don’t think I need to see a doctor, but I still have a ways to go before I’m well. Oh, other good news is I’ve lost 3 lbs from being so sick with no appetite, but I’m not counting on those staying gone when I do get my appetite back…

Here’s an odd thing though…Kylie the Kitty has only decided since I got sick while I’ve been propping myself on a plethora of pillows that she needs to curl up & sleep on my larynx & sternum, between my neck & chest, several times now…a very odd place to sleep, and honestly I was so tired I wasn’t arguing…do you fellow ailurophiles think she thinks she’s Vicks Vapo-Rub Incarnate or something? I’d believe she’s that smart, but she’s not usually so considerate…she is a cat you know… 😉

Yesterday she was fine, but this morning Kylie’s right eye was fully dilated & non-responsive to any light. I can’t tell if she can see out of it since her other eye is thankfully fine. The rest of her face was okay, ears, whiskers & such, and she can walk fine, but who knows if something worse could be wrong with her, so after I got to work after the chiropractor, I called the vet but the only appointment they had was today at 1pm or wait until Monday. So that meant I basically turned around to drive home & am now working from home the rest of the afternoon…thank goodness again for a nice boss! She said “Isn’t this enough stuff going wrong for you yet?” I agreed…

Kylie has also been sneezing with what sounds like nasal congestion for about a month now, not getting better but not getting worse, so I asked them about that. I also think she might be drinking more water, but I don’t think her weight has significantly changed. Hard to tell about the water since in previous places her water dish wasn’t as visible to me every night. She has never had any major problems in the 11.5 years I’ve had her, but she has had her basic checkup & shots every December. An interesting cottonball dropping & throwing test to see which eye was responding was kinda funny, even Kylie was intrigued at the beginning, but was inconclusive. Her weight was pretty much the same as last checkup, but they recommended bloodwork & urine sample, liquid antibiotics by syringe into the mouth for the congestion (yeah right!), and wanted to check her eyes thoroughly, so they took her into the back and wouldn’t let me with her. Boy that was heartbreaking to listen to her, knowing that was her meow and that she was in pain, and that I wasn’t there to comfort her… They weren’t able to get the urine sample by needle they were hoping for, so we’ll wait on that and only try again if the bloodwork comes back with something warranting further testing. Even the same fluoroscein testing for any corneal abrasions that I get from my eye dr every year, but all was clear for that, plus no foreign objects in the eye.

What they did find was the pressure in the bad eye is through the roof, which is glaucoma. The pressure in the good eye is completely normal, but without knowing the cause of the glaucoma, we don’t know if it’ll spread to the other eye. It could be caused by a trauma, which I have no other evidence of that anything happened to her yesterday, some other underlying cause, or an infection, so they’ve prescribed an ointment for me to smear on her eye twice daily to see if that helps. If no progress, depending on the bloodwork too, they need to refer me to a specialist for anything further on the glaucoma. Just under $400 later, we left, and I’ve given her the first attempt at the oral antibiotics, got most of it down but with a big fight, so she’s under my bed now, with no way I can try the eye ointment until later. I has asked if I could put the antibiotics in her wet food, and that’s okay as long as she eats it all at once. I think that’s going to be the better plan or I’ll just have a kitty who hates me.

I just want my kitty to be comfy & happy. I’ve been a wreck today trying to figure out what I might have done wrong to cause this, which I know is silly because she’s at least 13 years old, so things are bound to happen, but I also don’t like being reminded that she won’t be around forever. All that plus having to hear her meow in pain at the top of her lungs through the door & down the hall had me demolishing a tissue, trying to hide from anyone seeing silly me crying. *sigh*

I’m waiting for the vet I saw last week to call me back. I think her “good” eye is less able to dilate as of around midnight, and she was washing both eyes so much last night her front paws & head were all scraggly. At least she’s giving the washing a rest as of this morning. Now today she’s been drinking water for about a minute straight about every half hour and is just letting it hang out of her mouth. That is not normal. My poor kitty…

The party will still happen, just might be less & less I get done before tomorrow night…

The vet called back & said the bloodwork from last week was fine, no diabetes or other issue, except for high thyroid levels, which would explain the excessive drinking and pressure in the eyes. To confirm they needed more blood, and then I’ll need to go to a specialist next week. I took Kylie in for another blood sample as soon as I was off the phone with the vet, and thankfully she didn’t yowl so that must have been better than last week. That is all I can possibly do for her today, since they wouldn’t prescribe anything for her until the next blood test results are back.

Since there’s nothing else I can really do for her now except give her cuddles, which is difficult when she wants to hide away from the light, I will keep her comfy and safely away from party guests tomorrow, then get her to the specialist ASAP next week. There are 3 treatments: lifelong medication, surgical removal of the thyroid (riskier since intrustive surgery), and best chance is radio-iodine chemotherapy, which is a week stay at the hospital then she’d be fine. The chemo only works in some cats, though, so the specialist has to determine if she’s a good candidate. At least I know there are treatments, and we are well on the way to knowing what it is & how to fix it. It’s still a little hard to be as enthused about the party as usual, but I have done all I can do for her today, which is really the best I can do for her right now.

Melanie was vacuuming for me while I was at the vet, which was even better for keeping Kylie calm since she hates that, and Kael was helping with Batato Chips too. Their afternoon timing was impeccable for keeping party prep going while I zoomed over to the vet. I am VERY thankful for helpers this year!

Back to party prep now…thanks for the good thoughts for Kylie…

Requiem for Kylie

Thank you so much to everyone for all your nice words. It is very helpful to know I have such kind & supportive friends. Our conductor called as soon as he heard about Kylie, saying he understands if I couldn’t make choir rehearsal, which made me very thankful, since all the sympathy would have had me bawling worse, and if we sang anything remotely sad I would have lost it entirely. My work team sent a giant bouquet of lilies with a sympathy card which was very sweet but made me cry again, then Nathania & Kevin left a beautiful cheery-colored bouquet with a nice card on my porch too. I spent my evening doing laundry, cleaning all the rugs and cushions Kylie used, reorganizing leftover food that was still good, and cleaning the fancy litter box thoroughly, so it all will be out of my sight for awhile to let me grieve, but all clean for a new kitty eventually. Yesterday when I’d walk past the uneaten food from Sunday night I’d just start crying again so it took me awhile to get the gumption to clean it up so I wouldn’t react like that anymore. I keep thinking I hear her cries for help still in another room, like ghost meows. My plan was to get all kitty stuff cleaned & put away, then watch Chuck & Heroes to get my mind off the day’s events so I could sleep, but I wasn’t letting myself until I finished cleaning the litter box, and that was the hardest since that was the last thing, and it required taking it apart and unhooking from the water supply. By the time I started watching Chuck, eating a couple pumpkin pasties & leftover pastry brie for dinner with a big glass of homemade cider, I fell asleep halfway through the show so I just went to bed around 1am. I slept well thank goodness but my eyes are still puffy. A couple emails this morning had me crying a bit again, and now my boss just wanted details of what happened so my eyes were leaking by the end again, but at least not the racking sobs of yesterday.

I’ve been feeling guilty about trying to celebrate Halloween, but today I’ve decided I’m going to try to enjoy it because I know Kylie appreciated & loved my quirks along with me. It was always obvious to everyone that I was her favorite person. The last several years she was even participating in the parties by being social and cooperating with the holiday costumes, so I think she would approve of me celebrating my favorite holiday. If I didn’t like Halloween so much I wouldn’t have been wanting a black cat in the first place, then my roommate wouldn’t have told me he saw a black stray cat on Memorial Day 1996, so I have always considered Halloween “our” holiday and Kylie was my favorite Halloween accessory. I am wearing my new black cat earrings today in her honor, but I’m still not sure if I’ll wear my whole devil costume to work tomorrow. Maybe resurrecting the Webmistress outfit is another option since I haven’t worn it many years now. We’ll see how I feel & how early I can get up in the morning.

Thanks again everyone.