So my little orange weirdo cat has his share of... odd habits. Chief among these is his inability to eat in anything like a normal fashion. In particular, he insists on taking his food out of the bowl a mouthful at a time, carrying it to odd places to hide it, and then hunting it down and fishing it out to eat, one kibble at a time.

This has always been adorable, and amusing, but never anything too odd or troublesome.

Until now.

Because at the moment he has decided that he needs to hide his food *between my toes. And I love him, but this is bizarre and tickles like you wouldn't believe.

He is so very peculiar.....

So. Just so y'all know, things are starting to go better.

Percival started to turn around as soon as we got him onto some pain medication (and let this be a lesson to me - and to all pet owners - pain in animals doesn't manifest like it does in people; when in doubt add pain meds). He's still not entirely back to himself, and when I tried to taper off the pain meds his appetite started dropping again, but it's still better than I feared it would be.

The kittens are happily settling into the household. Harry (the orange one) is a lovable nerd who adores people and human contact; he purrs as soon as anyone touches him, and loves to be picked up and cuddled. Harlequin (the black/smoky one) is our little Manic Pixie Dream Cat - she's too pretty by half, can't hold still, and drags Our Hero along on ill-advised but hilarious adventures. I am glad beyond words that we adopted them.

And me? I'm hanging in there, and the days are getting better. In particular, now that the weather is warm I'm starting to come back to life. We planted our veggie garden today, I've been going for walks almost every sunny afternoon, and the longer days mean that I feel like there's just more time to Do Stuff in general. Tango classes, jogging, theater (in the past two weeks I've seen both Book of Mormon and Chess), dinner with friends...

Life is busy. It's not perfect - Percy's still sick, and likely terminal; my shoulder/neck pain is still bad enough (after six-plus months of rest, PT, and acupuncture) that I need to talk to my doctor about more invasive treatment options; I still have my own demons that I fight. But it's closer to good than it has been in a long time.

On the one hand, the new kittens are fitting in just fine. They're healthy and happy and playful and adorable and awesome.

My old kitty, on the other hand? Not so good.

About 3 days ago he stopped eating. This is saying something, because he is obsessed with food. I can't remember another day in his life that he didn't eat, including the day he had a tooth extracted.

I thought it was just stress from the new kittens. But nothing helped. I tried anti-nausea meds; no help. I tried fluids to help hydrate him. No help. Appetite stimulants? No help.

I've got bloodwork running, but... checking him out today, he's also developed a heart murmur that wasn't there six months ago.

He hasn't eaten for 3 days now. He's 16 years old. Whatever this is, it's not good and it's not likely to be anything we can fix.

I've had this cat since before I went to vet school. I don't know how I'm going to live without him. And I can't help but feel like somehow, some way, this is my fault. If I hadn't brought these kittens home. If I had only rechecked his heart sooner. If... I don't know. If I had made different decisions.

My poor baby.....

I couldn't make her wait.

She was worse this evening than she was this morning. She wouldn't eat at all, even when I held her, and when I picked her up she was so cold.... and she wouldn't either rest or wake up all the way.

I am blessed enough to have a good relationship with the staff of a nearby clinic, and when I called they let me come in and help her pass. It was quick, and at least she's not suffering now.

We only had her for a year and a half. It feels so much longer, and nowhere near long enough. I wish I could have done more for her. I wish I could have fixed her, instead of just worked around her problems. I wish she could have lived forever.

She was so tiny and so ridiculous and so dumb and goofy and she would run around the house in circles and leap into the air for no reason. She never figured out how to climb the stairs, or eat solid food, but what she lacked in functionality she made up for in love.

Rest in peace, Moxie kitten. I love you.

( Poor little midget.... )

On a completely different note.... ( Obligatory cute picture of small child-substitute in a Halloween costume.... )

About 50 weeks ago, give or take, a half-pound of trouble came into my life.

She was two weeks old, brain-damaged, malnourished, and between the seizures, the hole in her skull, and her general level of debilitation and damage, I figured I was taking on a lost cause. I brought her home, with the understanding that I was opening up my heart and my life to something that would, ultimately, cause me nothing but pain at its inevitable loss.

And somehow, she failed to die. And there was a month or more of bottle feeding and daily bathing, and more months of tearing my hair out at her inability to learn to use the litterbox, or avoid getting lost in the dining room. There was near-death at the hands of an incompetent vet tech. There were semi-permanent changes to the structure of our house, and the transformation of our office into a nursery.

She's a year old, today. I never expected her to make it past a month. And then I never expected her to make it past six months. She's proved me wrong every time.

She still weighs four pounds; I doubt she'll ever get bigger. As far as I can tell, she'll never master dry food, or grooming; we've learned to just tie a bib on her whenever she eats. She still hasn't figured out to climb stairs or jump onto the couch, though she can scale four-foot fences with ease. She's never gone into heat, and I'm praying she never does, because the thought of putting her under anesthesia terrifies me. But, for better or for worse, it looks like she's sticking around for the long haul.

So today we had a birthday party for her. Because, overcoming the odds that she has, she deserves to be celebrated.

( Photographic evidence behind the tag..... )

Happy birthday, Miss Moxie. I'm glad you decided to stay.

Apparently I have been remiss in keeping the divine Miss Moxie's horde of fans and followers up-to-date on her status, and for that I apologize.

So, how is the little lady doing? All in all, not too badly....

She's still little, for one thing. She's about 6 months old now, and when I last took her in to work a few weeks ago, she still weighed in at a whopping 2lb 6oz. umbran has started looking into what it would take to get her officially declared the World's Smallest Cat; apparently the current holder of that title weighs 3lb 1oz.

She's sloooowly starting to learn. Somehow, in the past few weeks, she has finally started to figure out what the litterbox is for, as long as we keep her more or less in her own room. She gets to run around the living room in the evenings, since that seems to be her most playful time, and the arrangement seems to be working out so far.

And she loves to run. Her favorite pastime, in fact, seems to be running in circles (clockwise, almost always) around the living room at maximum speed, jumping into the air at random intervals. Luckily, she hasn't figured out that jumping is a tool that could get her over the foot-high barriers keeping her out of the rest of the house. She's also, just in the past few days, started actually playing with items in the environment - instead of just flailing her paws randomly in the air, she now flails them randomly in the general vicinity of toys and (much to my other cat's chagrin) my other cat, occasionally even making contact. Alas, this new developmental stage seems to have come with the additional new interest of chewing on electrical cords; luckily her jaws and midget teeth aren't powerful enough to actually chew through anything.

Grooming is still a bit of a challenge. She's figured out how to groom her paws, at least a little, but she hasn't figured out what to do about her face, and she still eats by just face-planting into a bowl of canned food, and then dragging it around the room. So she still needs to be bathed at least once a week; luckily, she's still too small to put up much of a fight.

So. Still tiny, still not the brightest bulb in the marquis, still a darn good thing she's cute... but I still love her. I think she's just going to be a permanent kitten, and I can live with that.

( What, you want pictures? Oh, all right.... )

As some of you may remember, I have a brain-damaged kitten. Said kitten was also doing remarkably well, all things considered. She was weaned onto solid food, she was growing and playing and learning how to irritate the heck out of my senior cat, she was overcoming most of her developmental obstacles, with one exception - she wouldn't learn how to use the litterbox.

I tried everything I could think of, and ultimately called another veterinarian who specialized in treating behavioral disorders. And the one thing we thought of that we hadn't tried was putting her to socialize with another litter of kittens - maybe seeing other age-mates use the box might get her to learn by following. And it turned out that one of the techs I work with at one particular clinic is a volunteer kitten raiser for a local rescue group, and had a litter of babies. And she agreed to take my kitten for a little while, to see if this idea would work.

And so began Moxie's trip to boarding school. That was about a week and a half ago. We called to check on her a few days in, and were told that she was doing well - playful, eating, not quite sure what to do with the other kittens, but overall fine. And then... nothing. We tried to call the tech a couple of times, but got no answer.

Today I was working at said clinic. I started to worry when the office manager greeted me with condolences on the poor, sad, sickly baby I had taken on, and then proceeded to tell me how upsetting it was that the kitten couldn't track with her eyes, wouldn't look at anyone, and just lay there all the time while she was in the hospital, and how they had all been concerned that she was blind. I explained, a bit shocked, that she had not been anything like that when I left her, and she responded with a careful facial expression that made it clear she thought I was deeply in denial.

(And for the record, I am ripshit mad that, when the kitten at the clinic did not match my description, health-wise, NO ONE there thought to call and tell me - apparently the opinion of the entire staff was that I must have just been exaggerating about how good she was, and was in denial about her state.)

I called the foster mom, and didn't get an answer, but an hour or so later she ran in, dropped off the kitten, and ran out again. And I nearly burst into tears.

My poor baby. When I dropped her off, she weighed almost 2 pounds. She's now down to 1lb 3oz. She is too weak to walk, and can barely stand for a minute or two, before shaking and falling. She's lethargic, minimally responsive, and, unless prodded, just lies on her side in the corner.

She's filthy - her fur is stained yellow and clumped, and her skin is red and raw. The tech assured me that she was bathing her every day, but... evidence goes against that claim.

When I suggested to the rest of the staff that I was concerned about malnutrition, they refused to believe me, and kept insisting that she had a degenerative neurological disease. I mentioned that it was awfully coincidental that the degeneration didn't start until I had let her out of my sight. But... I was willing to give the foster house the benefit of the doubt.

That was until I went to put her back in her carrier to take her home. The same carrier that the tech had brought her in that morning. And I found the bowl of food in there. Specifically, the bowl of rotten dried-up food, with two different kinds of mold growing on it.

I have no more words.

My kitten nearly starved to death. I can't, at this point, guarantee she's going to make it. I've been feeding her every couple of hours, and I've got her back on the bottle just to try to rehydrate her and get some extra bonus nutrition in, but she's pretty far gone. And even if we do get her re-nourished... she's still developing, and God only knows what this episode of malnutrition did to her already-inferior brain.

I'm willing to cut the foster mom a LITTLE slack - Moxie *is* a special-needs baby, and you can't just throw a bowl of food in with her and expect her to eat whenever she feels like it, like a normal kitten - she needs to be placed near the food, and watched to make sure she eats. Maybe we didn't make that clear enough to her. But still. She should have noticed. She should have recognized that she wasn't eating. Hell, she should have recognized that she wasn't MOVING. She should have recognized that she was losing weight, and going downhill. Someone should have called me.

I should never have let her out of my sight. She's nearly dead, and it's partly my fault. And even if she makes it, she spent a week suffering and starving, and I can't get that out of my head.

Please, if anyone has any positive energy to spare, I'd appreciate if you sent it towards a particular troubled, sickly, brain-damaged Persian kitten right now....

So it's been about a week and a half since the little as-yet-unnamed baby came into our house. And so far, she has not only failed to die, but, remarkably and amazingly, seems to be thriving.

We still haven't quite picked out a name for her yet - she's still enough of a baby that she doesn't quite have a personality of her own yet, and I don't want to saddle her with a name that doesn't quite suit her - but at this rate we'll need to pick something soon.

Watching a kitten grow is like watching time lapse photography. It's alarming how quickly she's changing and growing and developing. She's half again as big as she was when we got her, having grown from 8 oz to a whopping 12 oz; she can still curl up in one of my hands, but instead of just filling the palm, she takes up my whole hand. She's starting to look more like a cat, too, and less like a furry kidney bean.

When she first arrived, she spent most of her time sleeping or half-heartedly nibbling at the bottle. Now she grabs at the bottle to try to eat, and if we don't get it to her quickly enough she will start suckling at anything in reach - hands, pants cuffs, towels, you name it. And when she's not eating or trying to eat, she's starting to play and bat at things. She's more alert, too - now when I go to take her from her box, she's as likely to be sitting up and awake as she is to be napping.

The most drastic change, though, has been in her mobility. A week ago, she could barely sit up. On Tuesday she stood for the very first time. She wobbled, and seemed to not quite know what to do once she got there, and quickly flopped back onto her backside, but she stood up. By Thursday she was taking a few cautious, deliberate steps. Tonight she has been wandering enthusiastically around the living room. She still trips over her own tail, and when she's uncertain she's likely to just sit down and push herself backwards with her front paws, but she's walking. The progress, just over a few days, is mind-blowing.

Most importantly, so far, she seems healthy. I haven't noticed any seizures since the first day or two. Developmentally, she's as close to normal as I could hope for. She's clearly able to see and hear. Her open fontanelle isn't closed, but the bigger she gets, the smaller it feels.

I think she's going to make it. And while we wait, and watch, it's a hell of a lot of fun to see her grow.

( Obligatory baby pictures, hidden for those tired of kitten details.... )

I've joked to my husband before that, if we ever get a new pet, it'll have to be one that fortune hands to us - most likely with three legs, one eye, and some horrible and obscure medical condition. Vets don't generally buy pets, we take on fixer-uppers when their owners can't handle them anymore. It's just the way the world works. But for the past ten years, I've been able to dodge this bullet.

So I'm at work this morning, and I'm waiting for my next appointment to come in, when someone comes hurrying in through our front door, holding something tiny and fluffy in their hands. Their kitten fell and hit its head a couple of days ago, and isn't nursing, and doesn't seem right, and can we help them?

And they can't afford to take it to the emergency hospital. And its head is all squishy. And the mother has rejected it. And if they can't afford the emergency hospital, and maybe not even basic care here, what can they do? And could they just surrender it to us, maybe?

And my cat is dying. And I'm not a big believer in fate or karma or destiny, but....

So now I am the dubiously proud owner of a two-week-old calico Persian kitten with a face so smushed-in it's concave, an open fontanelle (the bones in her skull never closed properly), and probable brain damage. She's already had one seizure since I took custody of her, but she's also demonstrated some impressive skill at drinking milk replacer from a syringe, which is about the only major life skill I can ask from her at this point.

I know I can't get attached. She's a lemon, and her odds of making it are slim at best. And a part of me feels horrible for replacing Tristan before he's even gone. But she's also adorable, and fits in the palm of my hand, and I couldn't just toss her out the door or euthanize her without giving her at least what little chance I can.

And, you know, she's not the only one with a soft spot. Just luckily, mine isn't over my cerebrum....