Ten Good Things about Petra

1. Due to her origins as a rescued, injured, shelter kitty, we never knew what Petra's breed was. It's possible she was a ragamuffin or a British shorthair - she had a round, pumpkin-faced look, and the softest, thickest fur I ever felt on a cat. She was black and white, but not like most black and white cats. When you saw her fur in the sun, you saw how true black and true white she was - no hidden stripes underneath. She felt like a rabbit when you petted her, and was incredibly docile - she let us hold her like a baby, hold her upside down, and she enjoyed being petted backwards. Petra had perfect kitty eyeliner, a black nose with a tiny pink spot, and black freckles on her white front legs.

2. Petra was a fighter. Despite all odds, at around 8 weeks of age she managed to survive either an attack by an animal or a run-in with a car long enough for someone to find her and rescue her, and for the shelter to remove her leg. The vet who cared for her liked her so much she fostered Petra herself until she was well enough to be adopted out. Then, when she swallowed the needle, the only indication we had that anything was wrong was a couple of days of coughing like she had a hairball and a recurring respiratory infection. As soon as the needle was out, she was back to her normal self again. In this final illness, she lived longer than either of us expected, and even rallied a couple of times toward the end before her final decline.

3. Petra loved to sit in the sun and watch the birds and squirrels outside - we called it the kitty show. She made little "excited, want to hunt" meeshing noises whenever she saw something really interesting, whether it was something on the Kitty Show or a moth or other bug inside or a reflection of light on the wall. Seeing Petra get excited about something was one of my favorite things, ever.

4. From the very first time we met her, it was obvious that Petra loved Dan the most. When she was a kitten, she had a habit of sitting on Dan's chest at 4 AM, purring and making biscuits, and giving him head butts. Dan called it "morning lovey time." The first time we left her for a few days, when we came back, the first night she woke him up with lovey time about 6 times. Her habits revolved around getting Dan to pay attention to her, and he was the one who could calm her down best when she had scary phantom-limb pain episodes.

5. Petra was very particular about things she liked and things she didn't like. Sitting on laps: bad. Throw rugs on the floor: good. She was never much of a talker or vocalizer but there were a few things she said that were unlike the way any other cat said them (brrt moo brrt, for example). The last six months or so, most of what she said was moo. The loudest we ever heard her vocalize was on car trips to and from Dan's parents' house - man, did she ever hate that, and she let us know about it.

6. Our kitty had a great talent for fitting herself into unusual places, whether that be sitting on spiky box lids or finding hiding places where nobody would think to look. Last Christmas we stayed up at Dan's parents' house for several days, so of course we brought the cats with us. When it was time for us to leave, we managed to corral Loki into his carrier pretty quickly, but we couldn't find Petra. We looked in all her usual hiding spots and everywhere else we could possibly think of, multiple times. We knew she couldn't have gotten outside, so we were pretty much at a loss. Finally, I found her hiding up inside an old desk; she had squeezed through a little hole and crawled up behind one of the desk drawers. I don't know how she managed it, but her hour+ of run-around was that much longer that she didn't have to be in the cat carrier.

7. One of the most important things to Petra was cleanliness. She insisted on bathing herself multiple times a day - up to 10 times, maybe, on some days. She also bathed Loki quite frequently; I think part of the reason why he is so soft is because she gave him baths. Bathing was like a meditation for her and sometimes she'd fall asleep right in the middle of one.

8. Along with the cleanliness issue came a distaste for just about anything that she thought smelled bad. If Petra smelled so much as a molecule of poop or old food or something else she deemed offensive, she'd cover it up with the nearest throw rug or piece of paper. We often came out in the morning to find one of the living room throw-rugs folded over because something on it didn't smell right to her.

9. Because she didn't have her left back leg, Petra would often sit with a glazed look on her face, stump twitching, when her left ear itched. Every time we noticed it we told her that she didn't have that leg, and we'd give her an ear skritching.

10. Petra was all about making good trades. She gave us a trick and we gave her treats. We gave her pets and she gave us purrs; it was the best trade we could imagine and we always felt we were getting the better end of the deal. The last few weeks while she'd been so sick, Petra never purred, even when we were petting her, so we knew she didn't feel well. This morning, after we'd made the appointment to bring her in, both of us sat next to her, petting her in all the best places. After a few minutes, she started to purr. It was the best thing she could have given us.

Read more about Petra here.

So how is Petra?

Monkey asked a few days ago how Petra was (in response to my "things I am thankful for" post, I believe, where I wrote "healthy pets").

The thanks I was giving was for Loki being healthy. Petra is still sick, and while we have been treating her for a serious e.coli infection, which it's possible it's all she has (and if that is the case, she'll have cheated death 3 times!), it's not likely. She's rallied a bit and put some weight back on now that we've been giving her lots of wet food and kitty treats. The past few days it's been cold, and Petra never acts like she feels very good when it's cold outside. She's always been kind of standoffish in the winter; we think the cold makes her stump hurt. So it is difficult to tell how much of it is that and how much is that she doesn't feel good because she's sick.

We have been continuing to give her subcutaneous fluids and antibiotics and a potassium goop shot into her mouth via large syringe (which she Does Not Like), and recently added a 1/4 tablet of Pepcid AC to help keep her stomach feeling OK so she doesn't puke up as much water. There has still been some troubling behavior, and she finishes the current round of antibiotics on Wednesday, so that's when she'll be going back in to the vet for a recheck.

There is a test that will tell us definitively whether or not Petra has cancer. It is very, very expensive and invasive and is something we just aren't willing to put her through. Because if she does have it, all we'd do is continue what we are doing. And if she doesn't, she'll get better.

The in-between is really frustrating, though. Our holiday travel plans (which we hoped would include going out to California for Wombat's birthday and staying through Christmas) are still on hold until we know more for sure. Neither of us wants to leave a very sick kitty, even with offers of assistance that have come from more than one place. If she doesn't have much longer, we want her to be in her own space and stressed as little as possible, not upset that her humans are gone or being in someone else's space.

I'm desperately homesick right now; we haven't been to California since May (the longest I've ever gone since moving here) and I miss my family and our friends in California fiercely. I am going to be so, so incredibly sad if we can't go for Christmas. And I feel guilty that I'm thinking about that rather than thinking about what is best for Petra. But damn, it's really hard for me right now. Good thoughts appreciated. And for any of you reading this who might reasonably expect a knitted gift from me this year, know that Petra seems to be infusing them with extra love and attention. The past two days she's been curled up in my knitting and it may never look the same.

The enemy's gate is down

About two weeks after Dan moved in with me, we went to the Denver Dumb Friends League to find a kitty. I'd wanted one since I moved to Denver, and had purposefully found an apartment that was pet-friendly. But I wanted to wait until Dan moved in, since I knew he was going to, and figured it would be easier to wait until after that happened.

Luckily, Dan was amenable to the idea of kitty-having. So we went to the DDFL and looked at the kittens (I wanted a kitten. Sue me.), but didn't see any that seemed like OUR kitty. A week or so later, we went in again. Our neighbor Paulene was a volunteer there, and when we got there we put our name on the waiting list (for a "hang out with a kitty" room, and the option of hanging out with three different kitties) and wandered around, looking at our options. We saw a few that looked promising; they'd just gotten a couple of big litters of kittens in so we figured we'd find one in that bunch. Right after we came in, a couple with a little girl came in as well, so they were just below us on the list.

We brought in one kitten. It wasn't ours. We brought in a second kitten. Not ours. Paulene came by to see how it was going, since she knew we were there to find a kitty, and she asked us, "Have you seen the little one with three legs?" No, we had not, and opted to visit with her next. She was brought in the room and we were instantly smitten, particularly Dan (I suspect she stole his heart right then and there). "This is our kitty!" we knew, just as that family with the little girl was walking by, pointing at our new friend, saying how that was going to be her kitty.

Sorry, little girl. We were first, therefore, she was ours.



We brought her home and spent the next couple of weeks trying to determine her name. The shelter had named her "Bug" (as in, cute as a? I'm not sure. She didn't look like a bug.) but we knew her real name was something entirely different. Our kitten was strong, a fighter. When she had been a tiny kitten, probably no more than six or eight weeks old, something had happened to her, and someone had found her at the side of the road with her left back leg all mangled and smashed. They brought her in to the DDFL, who amputated her leg. The vet who had cared for her there was so enamoured that she fostered the little kitten herself for the month that it took for her to convalesce and get healthy enough to be adopted out.

Over that first week or ten days when we had her home, we ran through any number of names. Miette, maybe, after the scrappy girl in The City of Lost Children. Or Leeloo, after the character of that name in The Fifth Element. One afternoon, we had our door open and she ran from one of us to another, hiding behind us and other obstacles in her path to get to our neighbor's door on the other side of the hallway. "The enemy's gate is down," I said, and we knew right that her name was Petra, after the girl soldier in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. It was perfect.

Petra charmed everyone she ever met. All of our neighbors loved her. How could you not, with a face like this?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Two weeks ago, we took Loki and Petra to the vet. It was partly because they needed booster shots and a checkup, as it had been a while since their last visit, but also partly because we'd noticed some disturbing things. Petra had peed a few times outside of the box, something she'd never done before. She seemed thirsty all the time, and would get really excited about having her water dish refilled or the tap turned on in the bathroom sink for her to drink from. She was also throwing up water, and seemed like she was losing weight. Thinking maybe she had diabetes or something else managable, yet still scary, we told the vet about the worrisome symptoms we'd noticed.

Loki was given a completely clean bill of health (and later, when his lab results came back, the vet told us that he was about as healthy as a kitty could possibly be...so, yay!)

Petra was a different story. "We'll have to wait for the labs to come back," he said, "but it's entirely possible it could be one of many different things - none of them good." Her kidneys were enlarged, and that on top of her other symptoms pointed to either renal lymphoma or a congenital kidney defect, neither curable. He asked us about her breed background, if we knew anything about it, and asked if she'd ever tested positive for FeLV, since that was a primary cause of kitty lymphoma. At home, we went through her records from the DDFL but didn't see anything that said she'd tested positive for FeLV. The next morning, the vet called with her lab results: an elevated white blood cell count, which could point to a bacterial infection. We put her on a ten-day course of antibiotics and waited to see what would happen.

Nothing happened, except that she got really pissed about having to take a pill twice a day. She didn't get any better. She continued to drink a lot of water, puke water, and lose weight. So yesterday we brought her back in for the news we'd been dreading, the news that I'd had nightmares about all Monday and Tuesday night. The vet said that we could do an abdominal ultrasound, an asperation of the kidneys, a biopsy. But with her symptoms, and the fact that she'd lost almost an entire additional pound in two weeks, and the fact that her kidneys were an additional 25% larger, made it pretty clear. Petra has renal lymphoma.

Lymphoma in cats can be treatable but is not curable. And after doing some extensive research online last night, we realized we had made the best choice about what her treatment will be. Some forms of feline lymphoma respond well to chemotherapy, giving pets an additional five or six months, a year, even two years in outlier cases. But renal lymphoma, especially at the stage where Petra probably is, does not respond as well. We would rather have her for a few more weeks and give her a good quality of life, where she is happy and comfortable, rather than put her on chemotherapy (when who knows how she will respond to it, if it will make her feel worse, etc.), and try to prolong her life at the cost of her happiness. We will be treating her with administered-at-home subcutaneous fluids (to help her kidneys function better) and prednisone, a cortical steroid that will help slow the progress of the disease. But she is not going to get better.

I don't know how much longer we will have with our friend Petra, but we plan to make the best of it. We're going to take lots of photos and videos, give her treats every day, and make sure she knows how much we love her. And I'm going to write more about her, about her other brush with death, about her likes and dislikes, about the things we are going to miss so much when she is gone.

Blue

Sometimes it is difficult to write about things that I really want to write about, because of my blog audience. Needless to say, those of you who read my blog regularly may have noticed that I'm not posting as much as usual and not writing anything of substance. Part of this is because I've been feeling a little blue recently, what with it being winter (though we've had sunny warm days this week, it depresses me more to have that kind of weather when everything outside is stark and brown and bare; I'd rather it snow, honestly) and what with having had a cold now for more than two weeks (Day 18, and still not done being sick) and what with the impending arrival of my Official Descent into Decrepitude. That's right, my 30th birthday is coming up in 5 weeks and I always have a hard time this time of year, but this year is different than most because it's a big birthday.

I haven't done anything for my birthday in years other than maybe Dan makes me a cake and a nice dinner. The parties I've attempted to throw since moving to Denver never seem to work out, but this year I really wanted to do something to mark the occasion of my becoming one of the hordes of women in this country who are unimportant because we are out of our 20s (because everyone knows, women lose their looks and their importance to cultural relevance once they're 30+). For a while, I was tempted to just start celebrating anniversaries of my 29th birthday like someone I know used to do, but my Oldest Friend turns 30 a week before I do and she's embracing the new number in our age so I suppose it would be kind of silly for me not to do the same thing.

I feel like I'm in a holding pattern right now, waiting through the last bit of Dan's schooling, waiting through the next few months at my job (which is another post entirely that I can't write for obvious reasons) until our circumstances change and I can leave, waiting for a sign of spring somewhere to give me hope that the world isn't going to be drab forever. Waiting to see friends and new babies. Waiting to be over this damn cold so I can start running outside again, and refocus on losing a little bit of weight I'd like to lose before we start seriously getting down to the business of baby making. Waiting until our savings account has more padding.

Since there's nothing I can do to speed the passage of time, I've decided to take a page from several other bloggers I've seen, to find grace in small things. Mostly I try to stay positive, stay on the bright side of life, but in the dog days of February in 2009 I'm having a difficult time making this happen. So here's to a recommitment of positivity.

1. I am making a baby blanket for Spats Turkey, and it is going to be awesome.

2. Leftover spaghetti for lunch, so tasty.

3. Finding out the giftmas present we sent for Wombat was received.

4. Renting a cabin in the mountains for the weekend

5. Matching dad and baby 'staches.