July's Cats

Aug 19, 2007 17:11

Urg. Over two months since my last post.

First of all, thank you to everyone for the birthday messages and cards way back on the 6th of July. I did see and appreciate them, truly, although I probably didn't deserve them as friends' birthdays have been passing me by here for a very long time.

I did have a very good birthday, although I spent it pretty stressed and frazzled and rushing around crazily. It was good because:

a) my 12 year old cat Tabitha was still alive. She got very suddenly very sick at the beginning of that week. I took her to the vet on the Wednesday, and it turned out she had severe pyometra (infection of the uterus) which had probably been developing slowly over a matter of years, although she'd shown no obvious symptoms until it flared up. Tabs got an antibiotic injection on the Wednesday, which helped a bit but not enough so on the Thursday the girl vet decided to operate to spay her, as this was her only chance. Because of the infection this was not a simple or minor operation - even the vet was so gobsmacked at the size of Tabs' uterus, hugely enlarged with the long-standing infection, that she kept it in a kidney dish, swimming in the pus that had come out of it, to show me it when I came to collect Tabs in the evening. (Another reason why I love this vet!) On the Friday - my birthday - I really had to go to work as I was the sole admin cover for our office at that time and there was loads of work on the go, although I hated to leave Tabs with no-one to keep an eye on her less than 24 hours after such major surgery and I arranged transport to rush home in my lunch hour to check on her.

b) it just happened to be the day when I'd arranged to collect and bring home a new kitten after work. This had been organised long before Tabs got sick - I'd seen and chosen the kitten back in June, when he was just a couple of weeks old. (I didn't mention this out of superstition, I guess; last summer, I was meant to be getting a kitten but the whole litter were killed by a fox or a tomcat while they were still with the mother cat in a nest in a barn, so this time I didn't like to count my chickens kittens before they were weaned...) It made life rather complicated, to introduce a new kitten when Tabs' recovery was still uncertain and when she needed to be isolated in a room to herself until her stitches were removed, and the kitten's owner would've kept him longer for me if necessary, but for various reasons I felt it would be better to get him out of his original home as soon as possible.

Over his first night with me, until I could see that he was eating, drinking, using his litter tray and otherwise healthy, and that he and my other adult cat Skye would be OK together, I kept kitten Leo in the bathroom. As none of them liked being on their own, I had a hectic night of it, dividing my time between Tabitha in the living room, kitten Leo in the loo, and Skye with the rest of the flat to herself, while the two I wasn't with at any given time wailed through the walls and scratched at the doors. Luckily Leo seemed healthy and Skye was fine with him, though somewhat wary of the scary kitten, so Leo was given the run of the flat with Skye after a vet health check in the morning. Tabitha remained in the living room on her own for a week to minimise the risk of catching some infection from the kitten until her wound healed, but in any case behaved as if she'd known him forever from the moment she was let out.

So we were all settling happily into being a 3-cat (actually more like 3-crazed-kittens-on-speed) household... until, about three weeks later, the woman who owned Leo's mother was found dead in her home, having lain there undiscovered for probably four or five days. She was a social work client with children in local authority care, and had been slowly drinking herself to death over a period of many years... I'd guessed she was in her fifties, but recently found out she was in fact years younger than me. When she died, she had five adult cats and one kitten she'd kept from Leo's litter. One of the cats was dead in the house, the SSPCA were called to collect the others for rehoming. However, I decided to take the other kitten, and the woman's neighbour adopted the kittens' mother, also a very young cat.

To my relief I didn't have to go into the house any further than through the back door into the kitchen to catch the kitten when the police let me in - the poor wee soul was very frightened, but also just desperate for anyone to go to, I think. When I brought him home he was very hungry and thirsty and ate and drank phenomenal quantities for several days, but he was basically fine. The two siblings seemed delighted to be reunited and have been rampaging around the flat together ever since. If the woman had given him a name, I didn't know it, so I've called him Gem. Initially I had some thought of perhaps trying to find a nice home for him (apart from mine) after I'd made sure he was fine and healthy, but I admit it really took me no time at all to decide I'd be keeping him myself. Tabs and Skye seem to have taken to both the kittens readily; I already knew they both liked other cats before I decided to get a kitten at all, and in a way having the two kittens together gives them more peace, as the kittens play mostly with each other, while Tabs and Skye join in whenever they feel like it.

Gem was a right wee fleabag when he arrived, so of course all the cats and my flat got the fleas too. The cats have all been flea-treated and now the only one left for any remaining fleas to bite is me. I've been doing wash after wash of cat beds and soft furnishings as well as flea-spraying around the place, but even so I've been driven so crazy by big itchy bites that I've taken to using kitten flea-spray on myself like perfume for the last few days.

What else...? Having found an excellent vet, the one that saved Tabs' life, I decided to seize the moment to get Skye spayed too, the week before last. As she was healthy to begin with, she recovered very quickly; the great challenge was persuading her to leave any stitches in the wound long enough for it to heal. I knew she'd freak out if I had to put the buster collar on her, but fortunately I found some soothing wipes that make the area around the wound taste bitter - her expressions of disgust when she tried a lick were hilarious, but she let it be just sufficiently, though in the end she left only one stitch for the vet to remove.

I haven't totalled up the exact figure, but with operations, vaccinations, flea-treatment and worming, I must've spent over £500 on vet bills in the last six weeks, with more to go when the kittens get neutered in a couple of months' time. So much for any hope of a holiday away this year - not that there was much anyway, with now four cats and no cat-sitters.

In other, non-cat-related news... well, nothing much at all. Work is busy, boring and more or less bearable. I suppose what I hate most about it is that I seem to find it inordinately exhausting. I frequently come home from work absolutely zonked, too tired to be bothered doing anything at all, including preparing food, cooking and eating. Often I just veg mindlessly in front of the TV of an evening, if I'm not actually sleeping or trying to sleep. I think other people on my f-list who report the same kind of thing are working longer hours at far more demanding jobs than me, and in reality don't do half so little with their time outside work either. Part of my problem, I'm sure, is that my diurnal rhythms just don't suit 9-5ish hours and never will. I'll never be a morning person, and then for various reasons I find it hard to impossible to stay asleep for more than about 3 hours at a time. While I can survive on that much sleep per night and remain reasonably functional indefinitely, the consequences are this constant lethargy and exhaustion that makes me pretty much shut down outside working hours - perhaps indistinguishable from a kind of depression. Wherever possible I try to fit in a couple of 3 hour or so sleep slots in a 24 hour period, but the 9-5 schedule makes that difficult because often the available time for sleeping doesn't coincide at all with my natural sleep patterns - I also have a very drifting biological clock, which seems to operate on a day-length considerably longer than 24 hours. All of this leaves me pretty much permanently fucked as far as sleep goes. I think back to the years when I was self-employed, and usually free to sleep when I could sleep, with tremendous longing. I think just because of that simple difference, I was able to work far longer hours and still do much more in my non-work time without difficulty. The difference is so great that I feel the 9-5 job is actually keeping me unwell all the time as well as killing my life outside work. As things are, I just spend all my weekends trying but never really managing to catch up on sleep and essential housework. I think this is no way at all to be living, but I don't see any alternatives.

Possibly another part of the problem is the nature of my job, which is always reactive, constant interruptions, switching and multi-tasking. I can do that - even fairly well, I suppose - but I think I find it unduly stressful and tiring. It's just not me. But again, I look and don't find any other types of jobs in this area that I could get that pay as much, and the wage for my current one is quite shite enough.

Heh... so I get cats to cheer me up. Click on the kitten pic or go here to see more.


kittens, whining, photos, work, cats

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