Pushkin
Pushkin
1998-2012
When I adopted Sweetie from the shelter in Winnipeg in the summer of 1998, there was also a litter of kittens there. They were, of course, exceedingly cute, but I wasn't looking for a kitten. Several months later, _the_boy_ decided to adopt a cat as well. There was a rambunctious kitten he was interested in, and also a slightly older cat who stared at The Boy longingly whenever he was in view. That was Pushkin. He'd been one of the kittens in that litter, and had been adopted, then returned by a family who claimed he wasn't good with children. Push, obviously, won out in the end.
So, after Sweetie and I went back to the States again, Push kept The Boy company, and vice versa. Then they moved down to join me -- with a stop to visit his sister's family, where it was proven that Push was in fact just fine with little kids, and also that he had the magical ability to hide inside a bed with no apparent entrances for a nice long nap. The Boy'd actually started making arrangements to have him sent to us when he showed up again, by the time they found him.
Down in SoCal, Push and Sweetie tolerated each other acceptably, though they weren't ever fond of each other. Push was the one who noticed boB hiding on our patio as a tiny, accidentally abandoned kitten. In NY, he once caught a mouse... and then wandered around holding the terrified but unharmed creature in his mouth, meowing plaintively because he wasn't sure what to do next. (The Boy relieved him of the mouse and freed it in a field a ways away.) He liked to chew on hard plastic things, like the antenna of my old cell phone, when we weren't looking. He and Miles would curl up together, groom each other, and reliably devolve into a fight over who got to groom whom. And often when he had been grooming himself, he'd forget to pull his tongue in and sit there for ages with the pink tip of it sticking out.
He had a chronic runny nose all his life. The first vet said it was some kind of allergic reaction to not having enough other cats around, after the shelter. Our other vets seemed to find that reasonable enough. It wasn't until we took him in to our current vet a couple months ago, worried by his 'cold' suddenly getting much worse, that we learned that wasn't the case; it was a chronic viral respiratory infection. We were able to treat it back to its baseline level, but he still didn't seem well. I'm mentioning this part in case anyone else has a similar issue with a cat sometime -- as I understand it, if the first vet (or the second, or maybe even the third) had diagnosed it correctly, it could have been cured instead of just lessened. Further, it may have contributed to his death.
Today, he was supposed to have an exploratory procedure to see what was causing the swelling in his cheeks, and the pain in his jaw. When they went to anaesthetise him, they discovered that his mouth could not be opened. I had fed him a bit of hamburger by hand as a treat within the last day or so, so we know that this was a new thing. Once they did get him under, and began to take the x-rays, he went into cardiac arrest. They did CPR, but were unable to save him. It came as a shock to us all, I think. As the vet had said when she checked him out on Tuesday, everything had seemed to be in perfect working order from the neck down.
They did the x-rays anyway, just for answers. And the answer appears to have been cancer. It had eaten away at the bones of his face and jaw, and was probably a quite fast-moving and aggressive type of the disease. Even if he had survived the procedure, we would probably not have been able to buy him much more time, if any; it's not a huge comfort, but it's something. We're also comforted by the fact that we were able to give him injections of a painkiller for the last few days, and though he was clearly unwell, he seemed happy and affectionate and got a lot of cuddles and love in that time.
Rest in peace, li'l buddy. We'll miss you.
