Fencing Bear at Prayer

The f*cking cat did it again. A few years ago, I can't remember quite when, but it was sometime in the autumn, probably October, I had the clever idea that it might be possible to keep the dog from eating the cat poop by buying one of those top entry cat boxes that keep dogs out and yet let cats in to do their business. Almost immediately, the cat stopped pooping.  Then peeing.  Or so it seemed. What really had happened was that the cat started peeing in the corner of the back room in our apartment, well away from the traffic, so it was days before I could figure out what was going on.  The cat seemed fine, even though (to judge from her litter box) she wasn't peeing, so I didn't take her to the vet.  I just kept waiting to see whether she would a) seem sick, or b) start using her litter box again. She never did.  When I finally found where she had been peeing, the rug in the back room was soaked.  I tried cleaning it with all of the various pet odo...

My family and I spent the greater part of Christmas day today waiting at the emergency room for the doctor to see...our cat. Who hadn't pooped in over a week and hadn't peed properly in several days. I took her to our local vet on Wednesday, and he gave her some Catlax, but still by this morning, nothing. And she wasn't eating any more. Time to take more serious measures. Who works at the animal hospital on Christmas? I'm not sure about the nurses and techs, but the doctor whom we saw mentioned that he was Jewish.* But we were hardly the only ones there bringing animals to be cared for. There were old dogs and puppies and several cats. Nor was our cat considered to be in the most desperate straits. Part of the reason that we had to wait so long (nearly three hours) before the vet could see her was that the other cases coming in were considered more immediately serious. But when she finally was called in, this is what the vet saw: All the poop from the past wee...

(click to enlarge)

TOM (1999-November 2, 2008) Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis. Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord: and let perpetual light shine upon them. --Antiphon for the Office for the Dead Requiescat in pace

Can you see it in his eyes? Yesterday, our cat had surgery, during which the vet removed a mass from his abdomen the size "of a small lemon" along with the adjoining lymph node. We are now waiting on the pathology report to tell us whether the mass was malignant or just one of those things that happen, on occasion, to grow in the intestines of cats. We should have known earlier that something was wrong. Tom (our cat) had been losing weight for several months; he is now only 2/3 of the cat he was in June. But he had long been somewhat overweight and we were not initially concerned. Nor, when we left him with the vet while we were in Europe in August, did a blood test that the vet did then show anything wrong. Tom had stopped eating the first few days he was boarding, but after some antibiotics and a hamster that had escaped from the upstairs pet store and, for reasons known only to the hamster, wandered into Tom's cage, he (Tom, that is, not the hamster) seemed to re...