But Tasha is not a less stressful kind of cat.

About eight weeks ago, out of the blue, I noticed that Tasha was limping pretty badly. She would put her right rear leg down only briefly and move her left rear leg as fast as possible, as if putting weight on her right leg was painful.

It’s hard to judge injuries with cats. I remember that shortly after we got Beezle as a kitten, he took a bad jump and was limping and mewling piteously, so we took him to the emergency vet. After taking an x-ray, she told us he was fine. As she put it, “Kittens are dramatic.”

On the other hand, Tasha was a bit more than a year old, and adult cats are famous for hiding pain to avoid appearing weak. If she was showing this much pain, she was probably hurting pretty bad. We figured it would be best to drive her to our local emergency vet. After examining her, they said she didn’t seem to be too seriously injured, but they recommended an x-ray to check her bones to be sure. We agreed, and the x-ray showed she had indeed broken a bone in her right leg.

In particular, she had a slipped capital femoral epiphysis (SCFE), also known as a capital femoral physeal fracture. I don’t know much about orthopedics, but let me try to explain it as best I can: In a cat, the femur is the single strong bone in the upper part of the rear leg — analogous to the human thigh. It’s big and strong in most mammals. At the top is a bulbous or dome-shaped structure called the epiphysis that sticks out to one side. It’s this bulb that fits into the hip socket and allows a wide range of movement. Between the epiphysis and the rest of the bone is a thin layer called a physis, also known as a growth plate. It looks something like this:

The physis is living tissue, mostly cartilage, that forms new bone across its lower surface, lengthening the bone as the animal grows. When the period of growth is over, the physis closes up to become solid bone. But until that happens, the physis is weaker than the surrounding bone, and as an animal grows larger, the stress on the bone increases with the need to carry more weight. For reasons not entirely understood, in some cats ordinary physical activity can stress the physis enough to cause a spontaneous fracture, separating the epiphysis from the lower part of the bone. This is what happened to Tasha.

I don’t have Tasha’s x-rays, but here’s a similar one I found online: The view is of a cat’s pelvis seen as if the cat were lying on its back with legs extended and you were looking down at its hips. The hip joint on the left side of the image (i.e. the right hip) shows the epiphysis has broken off and slipped away from the top of the femoral bone.

To make it clearer, here’s the same image with the growth plate highlighted in yellow and the epiphysis highlighted in red on both sides. (I think. I am not an orthopedic veterinarian.)

This generally needs specialized surgical repair, and the vet recommended a surgeon. We left with a small bottle of gabapentin pills to help alleviate pain and discourage Tasha from being too active. A few days later we took her to a specialty veterinary surgeon to see what he could do to help her.

It turns out that veterinary orthopedic surgeons fix femoral physeal fractures using a surprising procedure called femoral head ostectomy (FHO), in which they cut off the top of the femur and discard it, along with the broken-off epiphysis. I found an x-ray showing the result: Note the joint on the left side of the image has had the FHO, which you can compare with the normal intact joint on the right.

After FHO, the bones of the hip and femur are no longer in contact, but the joint still works, held together by scar tissue, ligaments, and the cat’s very strong jumping muscles. We were told the surgery has a very high success rate, and while it wouldn’t restore mobility 100%, Tasha should still be able to do normal cat things like running, jumping, and climbing.

In a human, you might try either replacing the hip joint with artificial components or using screws and pins to reassemble the femoral head. Both of these are possible in cats, but we’d need to have the procedure done in a good university veterinary surgery department, and the cost would be very high.

As it was, the FHO procedure would cost about $4000.

The surgeon had an opening the next Monday morning, so we set up an appointment, got more gabapentin, and kept Tasha dosed up until the morning of the surgery. We got up early, got Tasha in her carrier, and dropped her off at the vet. Later that day we picked her up, quite warn out, and took her home.

Although she had a long-lasting painkiller injection at the site of the surgery, we also had more drugs to give her. We had to confine her to one room by herself for several days so she wouldn’t re-injure herself with too much climbing, jumping, or fighting. As with her previous surgery, she immediately removed the protective collar.

Over the next couple of weeks she got a lot better. We took her to her first surgical follow-up, and the vet told us she was doing so well there was no need for a second follow-up. Pretty soon she was starting to jump onto the couch while I was watching television and climb the furniture in my office when I was working. She kept getting better

…until she didn’t.

I had noticed that her level of activity seemed to be declining. She moved less, she was still limping a bit, and she stopped jumping on the couch. The change was so subtle, I thought I might be imagining it, but one day I happened to see her climbing into the litter box, and she had to struggle at it, gingerly climbing in one leg at a time. This was not how she normally did that. And when she walked away, she was once again moving one rear leg quickly to spare the other.

I called the vet to setup the second follow-up exam. When we got there, he examined her right leg and said it looked fine, so he released her to walk around on the floor for observation. Meanwhile, I started explaining what I had seen that made me bring her in. When I mentioned her moving her leg really quickly, the vet asked me “Which leg was she moving quickly?”

I thought about it, and light began to dawn… The quickly moving leg had been the one on the right, the one that had the surgery. So she was actually protecting her left leg. And while we were talking, she did it again in front of us.

Veterinarians don’t entirely understand why some cats get capital physeal fractures. It’s not a matter of lifestyle because by definition the break happens spontaneously, without any obvious incident like a fall or getting stepped-on. It seems that some cats are simply prone to it. The current theory has to do with reduced blood flow during bone growth causing a weakness around the physis. But whatever the cause, it’s well known that the propensity to this kind of femoral fracture affects both back legs.

Yeah. Our little adventure cat had managed to break the femoral head in her other back leg. She was going to have to go through the whole surgical process again.

It’s now ten days past her second $4000 surgery, and we just got back from the follow-up exam. Again, the surgeon says she’s doing fine and doesn’t need a second follow-up. We were really glad to hear that. We’re also really glad Tasha doesn’t have any more femurs to break.

I feel so bad for her. She’s just a little kittycat. She doesn’t understand why any of this is happening. She just knows it hurts and we keep driving her to scary places and leaving her with scary people and shoving pills down her throat and locking her in the bedroom. She’s had a rough little kitty life.

She looks it, too. Siberian cats are supposed to be big beautiful fluffy cats, and Tasha is exactly that…from the front. But from behind, with her surgical wounds and all the shaved areas, she looks pretty roughed up.

This is a cat that has seen some things. She’s been through the wars.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Tasha the Adventure Cat, part 2: Wounds

Tasha’s life as a kitten has been an adventure. She explored the house with boundless energy. Just in her first few weeks with us she was accidentally kicked, stepped on, and even sat on. (All without injury.)

Tasha also turned out to be a fighter. Our Ragdoll cat Beezle loves to play-fight, and he’s always tried to start stuff with our other cats, so it was no surprise that he tried to fight with Tasha. And it turned out Tasha gave back as good as she got. Even as a kitten she would ambush him with a running pounce, hitting him squarely on the side and knocking him over. Beezle had been rambunctious as a kitten himself, so we figure he deserved it. In any case, their battles were always clearly playful, and they actually turned out to be good friends.

Chloe was a different story. We got her from a shelter as a young adult cat, and we suspect that her previous living arrangement may have involved considerable stress, such as living with aggressive dogs or poorly supervised children. As a result, Chloe is our scaredy cat. She hides whenever we have visitors. She’ll sleep in bed with my wife and I all night, but if she encounters me almost anywhere else in the house, she’ll scurry away. She also darts away when either of us coughs or sneezes. This is after living with us for eight years.

When it came to Tasha, however, Chloe didn’t run away. Instead she walked up in full predator swagger and pounced. Tasha quickly learned to respond defensively by hissing loudly and rolling onto her side to bring all four paws into the fight. Unlike the play fights with Beezle, these fights were driven by real animosity, literally sending fur flying.

At first, they were short fights — just a brief encounter with some hissing and throwing of paws. That’s not necessarily a problem. Cats are territorial predators, and scrapping with other cats is not unusual in a multi-cat household, as they establish areas of dominance. Unfortunately, these fights took an ugly turn because Tasha started running away and Chloe began pursuing her to continue the attack. In one heartbreaking incident, Tasha was so scared she peed herself.

From the perspective of cat sociology, such chasing behavior is a bad sign. It’s one thing for two cats to fight each other briefly for dominance, but because Tasha was a smaller creature that ran away, Chloe was starting to treat her like prey. Instead of fighting for dominance with an equal, Chloe was hunting. This is a troublesome behavioral problem. Not only is it dangerous for the “prey” cat, it’s also not something the cats can work out by themselves.

To prevent these kinds of problems, we normally have a process for progressively introducing a new cat to the household. It begins with isolation in the master bath, then timeshared access to the master bedroom, followed by supervised togetherness for feeding and play, leading eventually to freedom. This can take a week or two, depending on the cats. For some reason, however, it hadn’t worked this time.

So we reset to day zero and went through the whole process again. And we got the same result, complete with another peeing incident.

We realized we had to repeat the process a third time but really take things slowly. We started with the overlapping access program, with either Tasha or Chloe confined to the bedroom. We’d switch them out once or twice a day, generally alternating which cat got to sleep with us at night. We did that for months.

At some point during this time, we took Tasha to the vet to get spayed. She was not happy about this. She especially didn’t like the Elizabethan collar — the protective cone vets put around pets’ heads to keep them from gnawing at surgical wounds. She managed to remove it almost immediately. We tried putting it back on a couple of times, but she just kept taking it off, finally losing it under the bed. The very next day after her surgery, she escaped from her room and got into a fur-flying fight with Chloe. Fortunately, that didn’t reopen her surgical wound. She soon recovered, and we figured that was the end of her surgical adventures…

(Imagine ominous musical cue playing here.)

After a little while, we started leaving the bedroom door open, but blocking it off with a special cat gate. (A cat gate is a lot like a baby gate, except it’s five feet tall, because cats can jump a lot higher than babies.) That way Tasha and Chloe could see each other, and even swat each other through the bars, but neither of them could force the other into a fight. For the last two months, we brought all three cats together for feeding time. At first we fed them on opposite sides of the gate, but later we brought them together just outside the bedroom under careful supervision.

Thankfully, this time the process worked. Tasha and Chloe still get into occasional confrontations, but they are just normal cat scraps. Chloe is sometimes the aggressor, but more often what happens is that Tasha hisses defensively when Chloe approaches. If distracted, they will pass each other up without any sign of animosity. This, we agreed, was is good enough to end the separation.

We’d like to think our careful approach to bringing the cats together was successful, but realistically it could also be that Tasha just grew up into a fairly large cat, and Chloe no longer feels confident going after her. In any case, Tasha’s fighting adventures appear to be over.

Unfortunately, Tasha’s biggest adventures were yet to come.

I’ll talk about that in Part 2.

Update: Part 2 is up.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Tasha the Adventure Cat, part 1: Battle!

Some of you may know that our cat Ivy passed away a couple of months ago. We both needed some time for our grief to settle, but sooner or later, were getting another cat. We’ve learned that two cats is not enough for our household. We really need three cats, because then there’s always something going on.

Actually, now that we live in a house instead of a condo, we’ve been thinking we might actually need four cats, because they are spread out over a larger area, which reduces the density of cats and therefore reduces the probability of petting a cat. (That’s just science!) So my wife has been doing some research on cat breeds for a while now, and the more she learned about them, the more she wanted a Siberian Forest Cat. As with Norwegian Forest Cats like our Ivy, Siberian Forest Cats are the real deal: Unlike some other breeds, Siberian Forest Cats really do come from where the name says they do. They’re Russian cats.

Our new Siberian kitten was the daughter of two champion Siberians imported from Russia and bread by Karla Boston of Longmeadow Siberians, a cattery in lower Michigan. Longmeadow has a good reputation online, and when I reached out to several of her customers, they all reported that their kittens were healthy and that they had a great buying experience.

The latter is important because some cat breeders aren’t very good at customer service. They got into the breeding business as a hobby, which makes them terrific breeders — they truly love cats — but it doesn’t necessarily prepare them for the business of breeding cats. Some of them are grudging about answering questions, and they can be hard to deal with during the sales process. The worst of them just can’t let go and try to impose their will on new owners with excruciatingly strict and detailed contracts. On the other hand, people who enjoy breeding cats will almost always do a better job than someone who’s only in it for the money. Karla is clearly a cat lover, but she apparently has enough business experience to care about customer experience.

We were preparing to drive out to Michigan on Thursday, but Karla told us she had some business at her church on the south side of Chicago, which is a much shorter drive for us, and she offered to bring the kitten. So on Thursday we picked up our new little girl from Karla.

When we brought the kitten home, we put her in the master bathroom, dimmed the lights, and left her there to calm down after her very busy day.^[1]Cats prefer to hunt in the dim light just before dawn and just after dusk, and it’s the level of light that their eyes are best adapted to, so low light environments make them more confident and secure. We had supplied the room with a small furry cat tent for sleeping, several small rugs, food, two water sources, cat toys, a bench with a towel on it, a litter box, and a small piece of cat furniture that had scratching posts, a scratching ramp, a cat condo, a cat hammock, a cat basket, and a high perch.

We had also included a couple of surveillance cameras so we could check up on her. In typical cat fashion, she had ignored all the fancy cat furnishings and hid under the bench:

(Some of you may may have trouble figuring out that picture, but cat owners should have no trouble seeing a fluffy cat peaking out with one eye, which glows brightly in the on-axis infrared illumination of the camera in night mode.)

This looks kind of sad, but the large white object on the right is a filtered recirculating water fountain. Our kitten had a busy day, and was a little dehydrated from the trip, so she was just there to drink the water. We also had a more kitten-sized water bowl, but she prefers the fountain.

Later in the evening, I got down on the floor and tried to reach her. She hissed at me. A fierce kitten hiss. It was adorable. Then about 10 minutes later she came out to investigate me, and she even let me rub her belly. By the next day, we were letting her out into the bedroom and she was playing “chase the feather hanging from a stick.” She’s not very coordinated yet, but boy does she have endurance. After which she falls sound asleep.

Ever since my wife was a little girl, she thought Chanel would be an elegant name for a cat, after Coco Chanel and the fashion and fragrance lines she created. Unfortunately, Coco Chanel is also known for being a Nazi sympathizer — living in Paris during World War II, she sided with the German invaders, and was saved from trial afterwards only by Winston Churchill’s intervention.

I didn’t think it would really matter for purposes of naming a cat, but ultimately my wife just couldn’t do it. Instead, we fell back on our tried-and-true practice of naming our cats after fictional characters in movies or TV shows. Beezle is named after Patrick Bergin’s character in Highway to Hell and Chloe is named after Chloe O’Brian in 24 and Chloe Decker in Lucifer.^[2]Ivy was an exception. That was the name the breeder gave her, and it just stuck.

We thought it would be appropriate for a Siberian cat to have a Russian-sounding name, and after an exhaustive search (including asking ChatGPT for ideas) we settled on “Natasha,” thus naming her after several famous Natashas, including Natasha Fatale, tormentor of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Lieutenant Natasha “Tasha” Yar, chief of security for the USS Enterprise in the 2360s, Natasha Denona, a real-life makeup designer,^[3]With no Nazi ties and Natasha Romanov, the Black Widow.

Meet the new cuteness. Meet Tasha:

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Meet the New Cuteness

Ivy came into our lives in 2013.

We adopted her as an adult. The breeder had originally purchased her to be a queen at the cattery, but she never got pregnant, so at the age of four they spayed her and offered her for sale. When we visited her, we loved how friendly and cuddly she was. And for $400, we took her home. I wouldn’t normally mention the price, but a breeding-quality Norwegian Forest Cat like Ivy probably cost the breeder $3000 as a kitten, not including the cost of a round-trip flight to Germany to pick her up. We got her for a steal.

To give her time to get settled in at the house, we put her in the bedroom with no other cats to worry about. My wife and I joined her for the night, and when we woke up she was gone. Not in the bed, not under it, not in the bathroom or either of the closets, and not behind or under any furniture. We looked a lot. Eventually, while looking under the bed, I noticed there was a piece of fabric hanging down from the box spring. So we pulled off the pillows, lifted off the mattress, and lifted up the box spring to look through the muslin bottom…and there was a kitty cat inside. This was world champion hidey-cat.

After about a year, she took to hiding under the bed all the time. Our vet diagnosed her with some kind of glandular problem, and we started giving her medication. We also noticed that whenever she did come out, one of our other cats (Buffy) would harass her. We were never sure if the sickness made her a target for harassment or the harassment made her sick. I tend to think it was the latter, because after Buffy passed, Ivy came out all the time like a normal cat and the vet said she didn’t need any more medication.

Here at the new house, she developed a laid-back attitude. If we had visitors, one of our cats would run and hide, the other would come out to meet everybody. Ivy on the other hand, didn’t care. It could be friendly children wanting to play, it could be cleaners with a loud vacuum cleaner. In either case, Ivy wasn’t about to get up for it, because “Ivy don’t care.”

There was one exception: We started getting a neighborhood cat coming around to visit. He’d paw at the door and yowl loudly, and Ivy would go over and sit down in front of the window to watch him. We started calling him her “gentleman caller.”

Ivy was a friendly cat who always welcomed the attention we gave her — head scratching, hair combing, belly rubbin’ — which she would pay back with friendly licking. Over the last year or two, Ivy has been slowing down and seeking comfort. She loved basking in front of the fireplace while my wife worked in the study. Whenever my wife and I were watching television, she would curl up on the couch between us. If my wife got chilly and pulled on a blanket, Ivy would climb on top of her and fall hard asleep. At night, we’d often wake up in bed to discover her curled up on the blankets between us, happily purring away.

This afternoon, while lying in front of the fireplace, she started crying out loudly all of a sudden. She stopped when my wife picker her up, but she was breathing hard and fast and barely moving. We took her to the emergency vet, and the diagnosis wasn’t good. We decided it would be best to see her out of this world. She passed quietly with both of us holding her.

She will be missed.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ivy R.I.P.

But the big question was, would the cats recognize this contraption as a litter box? Our plan was to put it near their old litter box and see if they used it. If we only had one cat, this would be simple: We’d check the collection tray in a couple of days, and if we found clumps then we’d know he’s using it. But how could we make sure all three cats were using it? It’s not like we could watch it all the time.

The solution is obvious, and I’m sure most of you already figured it out: I setup a motion-detecting web camera with night vision that uploads captured frames to a server. Then we just reviewed the images to make sure that we saw all three cats in there.

Afterward, I turned about a thousand captured images into a short video for your enjoyment:

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at One Week at the Litter Box

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Election Day 2016 – Ivy and Beezle

My wife uses that second one as the background on her computer and that giant cat nose cracks me up every time.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Election Day 2016 – Cat Noses

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Election Day 2016 – Ivy In Her Cat Bed

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Election Day 2016 – Beezle Posing For the Camera

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Election Day 2016 – Ivy Stalks The Bed

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Election Day 2016 – Beezle In the Bathroom Sink

This used to be one of his favorite spots:

I never had a desk cat before, but now I’m getting used to it. Here he is, hanging out with me on my work desk:

Just a couple more pictures of the fluff:

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at More Photos of Beezle Growing Up

As is my way, I had put up a post about Ripley’s passing. Unbeknownst to me, someone over at the Opinionated Pussycat noticed it and posted a rather wonderful eulogy for Ripley which was picked up by The Cat Blogosphere, and a couple of dozen people stopped by in the comments to leave their condolences. It was very touching, and it helped.

I mention all this because we just found out that PDgirl‘s cat Simon — a foundling she’s only had since October — got so sick that she had to put him down.

I can remember how excited she was when she got him, and I know how cats can break your heart. So if you get a chance, stop by her farewell post for Simon, and send some comfort her way. I have the feeling she’ll need it.

Update: This post is now in the 512th Carnival of the Cats at Opinionated Pussycat.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Farewell Simon, We Hardly Knew You

You’ll notice that a lot of these were taken at my desk. I spend a lot of time there, working on my computer, and Beezle likes to come up and demand a little attention.

This was one of our favorites. I sent it to my wife with the caption “Kitten Malfunction”:

I’ll have a few more to post in later weeks.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Beezle Growing Up

[Update: This post is now linked at the Carnival of the Cats at The Opinionated Pussycat.]

We like to name our cats after characters from movies and television, and we decided to name this one “Hotch” after the character of Aaron Hotchner on Criminal Minds. “Hotch” sounds sturdy and reliable, and Ragdolls are big, sturdy cats, so it kind of made sense.

The problem is that you really have to get to know a cat a bit before you can learn his true name. Our new Ragdoll kitten turned out to be bundle of energy. Lots of energy. Scary amounts of energy. The video in this clip was from maybe an hour of total playtime.

Yes, he was like that all the time. Hour after hour, week after week. He was constantly running around, climbing pieces of furniture, jumping to other pieces of furniture, knocking off small objects and chasing them around the floor and eventually bringing them into the bathtub, where he could bat them around and around. Anything we touched, he would race over to explore and attack. He knocked over stacks of books, plates of food, small electronic gadgets, rolls of toilet paper, cups full of coins, stacks of boxes, lamps, external hard drives, speakers, and at least three 7-Eleven Double Gulps full of Diet Coke.

He was always trying to play-fight with the other cats (Ripley declined, but Buffy would take him on) and even with us. One night when my wife was trying to fall asleep, he scared the crap out of her by trying to play-fight with her face.

Most cats are pretty sensitive to your reactions. If they hop up on the table, all it takes is a gentle push in the right direction to encourage them to jump back down. The kitten wasn’t having any of that. If he jumped on the table to sniff at our food and we picked him up and set him on the floor, he would just jump right back up and try again. And again. And again.

These were not the actions of a reliable and sturdy “Hotch.” This was something else, and it was time to find a new name.

After some thought, we decided name him Beezle, after the character played by Patrick Bergin in 1991’s Highway to Hell, an amazing B-grade comedy/horror mashup that is probably best known for casting Gilbert Gottfried as Adolf Hitler. The story (spoiler alert) is about a young couple who stumble upon a literal highway to hell, where they meet a bunch of strange people, including a mysterious figure named Beezle. At first, Beezle appears to be friendly and helpful, but it is eventually revealed that that “Beezle” is short for Beelzebub.

Because this kitten has the devil in him.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at How Hotch Became Beezle

We adopted Ripley about 14 years ago from the Orphans of the Storm animal shelter about 10 miles north of Chicago. We had been thinking of getting a kitten, but we decided to get an adult cat, in part because most people pass them over in favor of kittens, but mostly because when you get an adult cat, what you see is what you get. If you adopt an adult cat, the way they are when you meet them is the way they’ll be for the rest of their lives.

We found Ripley by sitting down in the adult cat room and paying attention to which cats came over to play with us. Cat D51 (back then Orphans didn’t name them) came over to both of us several times and climbed right up into our laps. He responded to attention and purred and didn’t pick fights with the other cats. We decided to bring him home with us and name him Ripley, after Sigourney Weaver’s character in Aliens.

Just like at the shelter, Ripley loved to come visit us. The first time I laid down on the couch after bringing him home, he hopped right up and sat on my chest, purring. Almost every evening, my wife would sit in the reclining chair to read or watch television and Ripley would slowly creep up and curl up on her lap or her chest, where she could hold him and pet him. He was her best cat ever.

Toward the end of January, Ripley was diagnosed with immune mediated hemolytic anemia, which meant his immune system was attacking his red blood cells. Our vet gave him two transfusions and put him on very high dosages of immune suppressants. The drugs were causing liver damage, so we had to taper them off, and at yesterday’s vet visit, his red blood cell count was a little below normal again, and by this morning he was barely moving, so we took him right back to the vet for more tests. His red blood cell count had gone way down in just 15 hours, and his blood chemistry indicated multiple organ failure. There was nothing else we could do for him.

Ripley will be sorely missed. My wife is heartbroken. We’re both taking the day off from work.

Here he is with my old cat Dozer, who passed away in the summer of 2011. They were a couple of really good cats.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ripley R.I.P.

Our brown tabby, Ripley, is getting on in years, and we’ve noticed he’s been resting more, eating less, and generally just slowing down. We figured it was just old age, but in January he suddenly got much worse, so we took him to his vet, who figured out that he was suffering from something called immune mediated hemolytic anemia, which meant his immune system was attacking his red blood cells. IMHA has a very high mortality rate, and our vet figured there was less than 50% chance he would survive, even with treatment.

They gave him a blood transfusion to restore some of the blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity, which immediately restored some of his vitality. Then they kept him for a week for additional treatment, which included a bunch of drugs and a second transfusion.

When he was released from the veterinarian hospital a few weeks ago, Ripley was OK, but he hasn’t been bouncing back as well as our vet would like him to. There have also been a couple of days in which he started to crash during the day — stopped eating and drinking, and stayed in one location all day — so we had to take him back to the vet so they could give him more drugs and rehydrate him.

Since his release, we’ve been giving him several drugs, including high doses of the steroid prednisone, which suppresses his immune response. It also has side effects, which could include the problems with appetite and sluggishness, and our vet decided it was time to taper it off, which we’re doing now.

Also, to make sure he’s hydrated, every day we put Ripley on a high work table, hang a bag of veterinary-grade lactated ringers solution off our bookshelves, pull Ripley’s skin so it forms a tent-shape away from his body, poke the needle in, and open up the valve until he’s received 150 milliliters of fluid under the skin.

Ripley’s holding on and doing okay this past week, so it’s probably helping.

Still, it seems like a very weird thing to do.

Update: As it turns out, when I wrote this, Ripley was nearer the end than we knew. He will be missed.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Poking Holes In the Cat

I was going to blog about the President’s speech, but look! Kitty pictures.

Taking all these pictures of Hotch is proving to be more difficult than I expected. For one thing, the color balance is all over the place. The room is actually lit with incandescent light, which gives everything a warm glow, but of course the flash on the camera is daylight white. So while the colors in the camera images are probably accurate, it’s not matching what I saw when I was there, so I’ve been making some adjustments, and the results havn’t been very consistent.

The problem is that the camera is guessing one color balance and then I’m making rough adjustments to that guess, so the variance is accumulating. I should probably get out the grey card and switch to raw mode.

As you can see, Hotch thinks my iPhone case makes a great chew toy. Too bad the iPhone’s still in it.

The other problem with taking pictures of Hotch is that my focus technique doesn’t work very well. With the kinds of photograpy I usually do, I’ve found it works better when I disable the automatic auto-focus on the shutter button, so when I want to take a picture, I pick the object I want in focus, press the manual focus button, and then recompose the picture and press the shutter button. Now I can take as many pictures as I want at that distance, without the auto-focus deciding to do something different.

The problem is that Hotch moves so fast sometimes that between the time I press the focus button and the time I press the shutter, he’s moved away from the focus distance. I’ve taken thousands of photos this way — weddings, children, flowers, buildings, even marathon runners — and it works just fine, so I wasn’t expecting a problem, and it took me a while to recognize what was happening, because the camera’s LCD screen is too small to show the problem unless I know to look for it.

Still, I got a few nice ones.

More to come in a few days.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at More Pictures of Hotch

About 10 years ago, my wife had just adopted Ripley, and we were thinking of getting a kitten next, and we thought it might be fun to get a purebread kitten. We weren’t sure what breed we wanted, so we did some research on the web and at cat shows. Eventually we settled on the Ragdoll breed, and began to contact a few local breeders to learn to learn how the adoption process works and to get an idea of the difference between breeders.

What we learned — and this will shock you — is that some cat breeders are a bit nuts. They all had lots of special rules we were supposed to follow once we got the cat, not all of which seemed, uh, entirely grounded in reality. I remember one even wanted the right to take back the cat if they thought it was being abused. (Taking back an abused cat makes sense, but they wanted to make the determination themselves, rather than, say, a neutral veterinarian.)

That turned us off the idea a bit, and somewhere along the way we got a kitten from a shelter, Buffy. (I didn’t have the camera back when she was a kitten, sorry) Then, a year or so later, we were visiting the Orphans of the Storm shelter (where we had adopted Ripley and Buffy), and we stumbled a cat with more hair than I’d ever seen before. We picked him up and played with him and brushed his hair — which really needed it, there was an awful lot of loose hair stuck to him — and put him back in his cage. But he just sat there, looking at us with those big blue eyes… So we took him home, and he became my favorite cat, Dozer.

Sadly, Dozer passed away a few months ago. He looked like a purebread blue bicolor Ragdoll, and he probably was. You can’t really tell if a cat is purebread without the breeding history, but Ragdoll breeders are a fairly protective bunch, so there aren’t too many fakes out there. (Unlike, say, Persians.) Based on our experiences with Dozer, my wife and I decided that we must always have a Ragdoll cat.

After a period of grieving, we began looking at web sites for Ragdoll kitten breeders, trying to decide what kind of Ragdoll we wanted. My wife fell in love with the blue lynx pattern, and we found a couple of blue lynx kittens at Dr. J’s Perfect Dolls. Last Friday, we met with Jennifer Woll, DVM, and took home a kitten. Check out the expression on his face in this shot:

As usual, we had some trouble coming up with the name. Because he’s so cute, it’s tempting to name him “Nermal,” but he’ll eventually grow up, and “Nermal” is a silly name for a grown-up cat. We could also name him “Joel,” after the kitten in The Closer, but that too seems like a silly name for a full-size cat.

My wife likes “Roark,” after Eve Dallas’s love interest in the In Death series by J.D. Robb, which would also tie in nicely with my libertarian leanings because of the link to Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. On the other hand, “Roark” sounds a bit pretentious to me, and I’m not really a Rand fan. Alternatively, we could name him “Dallas” after Eve Dallas and also after the captain of the Nostromo in Alien.

For now, he’s Hotch, named after Aaron Hotchner, the character Thomas Gibson plays on Criminal Minds. Among other things, it has the advantage of being a single syllable, which means it might be possible to train him to respond to it.

It could happen.

[Update: We renamed him “Beezle” (includes video of him playing).]

Anyway, we have the kitten locked in the master bathroom for a few days as part of the process of introducing him to the rest of the household. He’s a bundle of energy, so I thought it would be amusing to setup the video camera to record his activity until it ran out of space, then I could edit it into a fun highlights video. As it turns out, however, all that energy is just for show. With no one watching, he just slept for an hour and a half.

I managed to salvage something, however, by compressing the video timeline. Here’s Hotch asleep for an hour and a half, shown at 50 times normal speed:

If you haven’t had enough, here’s the whole set of photos of Hotch.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Meet the New Cuteness

My big fluffy Ragdoll cat Dozer passed away this morning.

We got him from an amimal shelter in 2002 when he was about seven years old. We discovered him in a cage outside the adult cat room. He hadn’t been brushed regularly, so he was the fluffiest cat I had ever seen. I remember the sign on his cage said “If you pet me I will purr very loud.” We got him out of his cage and started petting him and sure enough, loud purring. Sort of a jackhammer cadence, nothing on the exhale, but loud and slow on the inhale.

We played with him a while and then put him back in his cage, because we hadn’t really planned on getting a cat that day. He just sat there, looking up at us with those big blue eyes of his. We decided we had to take him home.

Dozer was a very mild mannered cat. He slept most of the time, only perking up if the food bowl started to get empty. When I was lying on the couch, reading or watching television, he’d come over climb on my chest where I could pet him. Then he’d pad over to the space between my left side and the back of the couch, where he’d settle down and fall asleep while I petted him some more.

His hair rarely got matted, but when it did, I’d have to cut it out, which he hated. He’d try to make me stop by hissing, swatting me with his paws, and even biting, but it was all an act: He never once broke the skin. He was such a gentle creature.

Lately, he’s been struggling with severe health problems, starting when we came home from work a few weeks ago and found him having a seizure. We took him to the emergency vet, and they couldn’t do much for him, so we took him home to say goodbye. He actually started to get a bit better, so we took him to a vet we used to go to, and he said the problem appeared to be high blood pressure, so we started giving him meds for that.

He seemed to bounce back even more. Some of his personality returned, and he even visited me on the couch one last time.

But by the time of his followup appointment two days ago, he was getting wobbly on his feet and he slept even more than usual. The vet said his blood pressure was now too low, so we eased off of his meds, but when I woke up this morning, he was obviously in some kind of distress. I tried to give him some water, in case he was dehydrated again, but he passed away a minute or two later.

Dozer saw us through a lot, including the ups and downs of consulting employment, some stressful health problems for my wife, and the deaths of my both my parents.

I’m going to miss my fluffy buddy.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Dozer R.I.P.

Anyone who owns a cat could’ve predicted how that would turn out:

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Dozer Meets the Cat Pillow

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Dozer and Ripley

This week, a brief introduction to the cast:

More photos of the kitties coming next week.

Update: The Friday Ark is up.

Update: Kip blogs about his dog Diamond.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Triumphant Return of Friday Catblogging

Sounds about right.

(Hat tip: Illinois Review)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Herding Cats

Tonight I was finally feeling ready to doze off by about 4 am. I was lying there, relaxing, my thought process become disordered as I slipped into sleep… When I heard someone knock on the front door. Four rapid taps. Knock knock knock knock.

As I started to get up, I realized there was a more likely explanation for the noise, but by then the adrenaline surge had shocked me fully awake and alert. I grabbed a heavy police flashlight and went to investigate. No one was at the door.

It’s the damned cats. Did you ever see a cat sit down and scratch its head and neck with its back paws? Well, every once in a while they to this right up against a door, and one of the hard leg joints taps against the door as they scratch. Knock knock knock knock.

I’m used to most of the things cats do in the middle of the night: Meowing, hissing, chasing, even jumping into the bed and walking on top of me. Knocking on the door…that one still gets me.

Now to see if I can get back to sleep…

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Knock In the Night

This is my cat, Buffy. Click through to vote for her.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Network Admin Kitteh

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Friday Catblogging

However, I recently paid a visit to my friend Cindy to take pictures of her new kitten.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you…Minky!

Update: The Friday Ark is up.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Friday Catblogging: Minky!

And here’s a special guest cat, spotted on a neighbor’s balcony:

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Friday Catblogging

Update: The Friday Ark is up.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Friday Cat Blogging