Daisy and the closet

Daisy may be the smartest cat we have ever known. She has figured out how to break into our bedroom closet. The closet doors slide on a track. Daisy knows how to pry the door open with her paws, so we keep a stick in the track to stop the door from moving. Now she has learned how to paw at the stick until it pops out of the track. She is only interested in gaining access to the closet at 5am. The stick rattles and the doors rattle while she is working on this project. This has been going on for quite a while, the occasional rattling at the door at 5am, but for the past two mornings she has successfully removed the stick. Now we have to come up with a new system. A round metal rod, maybe? Getting into the closet is one of the goals of Daisy's life. She and Nick wait outside while I get dressed in the morning, calling and waiting for a chance to get in around my feet when I come out.

The closet rattling is not just a by-product of her desire to get into the closet. It's a pattern with Daisy when she wants attention. If I am working in my office, she is jumping on top of things or nudging picture frames with her head, knocking things off of the bookshelves, moving piles of folders on my desk, pulling highlighters out of the mug and throwing them onto the floor. When she first came to live with us, she broke several travel alarm clocks by knocking them off the bedside tables. Her fascination with the power of gravity is boundless.

Up and down the stairs

Frida had her recheck yesterday. Her condition is unchanged since she had the procedure last weekend. That is excellent news. It is not a given that she is in congestive heart failure. There is no telling where the fluid in her chest is coming from because we are not going to put her through testing to find out. Her doctor agrees with us on this. So we are continuing to treat the symptom, the fluid build up, and keeping her comfortable. She can have any food she wants, although renal diet would help her kidneys, and the diuretic puts a strain on them. She is doing all of her cat things as best she can. Her hind quarters are a little unreliable, so instead of scratching the post this morning she rubbed it with her cheek.

Meanwhile, Daisy is more acrobatic than ever, if that is possible. Any time we walk up or down the stairs, she comes running to beat us to the top or jump on the banister on the way down. When she had been with us for a few months, I put an empty tissue box at the top of the stairs to carry down for recycling. It was one of those boxes that are shaped like a cube with an oval opening at the top. Daisy stuck her head right into the box and couldn't get it off.  I tried to help her but she was moving too fast. She backed up frantically and went through the railing, straight down to the ground floor, and landed with a thump. That slowed her down long enough for me to run down the stairs and get the tissue box off her head. She was so rattled it took a long time to calm her down. She does not have anything to do with tissue boxes any more.

Beautiful Frida

Frida is eating like a teenager and she seems to be in good spirits. Here are some pictures from about three years ago. Of course she is quickly tired by any exertion, but she is able to lie down again pretty soon after she gathers her strength by sitting for a while. Her breathing seems a great deal easier. Today she went outside the front door for a few minutes for the first time in a week.

The book

I neglected to say that the hours passed pleasantly with The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe to read while Frida slept in my lap. The mysteries to be solved in this newest installment of the Number One Ladies' Detective Agency were more focused on relationships and navigating loyalties that ran across family, business, and friendship. Even the one actual client's problem was one of relationships-- a bad marriage. Several characters had grandiose ideas about their own talents and prospects but in the end they all came to a satisfactory understanding of how they could find a niche in the working world that they would enjoy. There was more internal musing, too, from several characters, to comical effect. Missing from the ending of the novel was the poem comprised of the word "Africa" repeated. Instead the married couple who are the anchor of all the other characters simply held hands in the garden, looking at their growing plants. I have enjoyed every one of the novels in this series. I find them light and airy but with good writing and creative problem solving.

Watching the clock

This morning I sat in the tv room and finished reading The Handsome Man's Deluxe Cafe with Frida curled up in my lap, a fleece throw wrapped around her. I looked up at the clock now and then, watching as noon came and went, sitting longer than I usually sit still because Frida was resting comfortably. We almost lost her yesterday. We almost said goodbye to her today.

Since we returned from a weekend trip, it became clear that her condition had taken a sharp downturn. She wanted to eat but couldn't eat more than a few mouthfuls. She sat up instead of lying down, obviously in distress. Her sides worked in and out as she struggled to breathe.

On New Year's Eve, I spoke to the vet tech who was there at the clinic when Rosie died. She knew exactly what was going on and said she would relay my questions to Frida's doctor after New Year's Day. We talked, and I took Frida to the clinic for another exam. She had her six month check up just the week before and was doing fine. But now she was in congestive heart failure, her chest filling up with fluid. An x-ray showed so much fluid that the heart and lungs were invisible. Her body temperature dropped. The doctor drained off some of the fluid and Frida came through it pretty well. It was milky, not clear as expected, so something else is going on as well. She is a tough girl, her doctor says. They gave her a diuretic shot and sent us home with pills. She was better, but not much better, so Bob and I scheduled a home visit to say goodbye at noon today.

We decided that taking her up to our bed might bring more strain than comfort. I spent the night with Frida, sleeping on an old futon next to where she has her heating pad on the love seat in the tv room. She got up during the night, drank water, went to the litter box like a good girl, and went back to her heating pad. She sat up for a while to recover from the exertion and then went back to sleep. At dawn she ate a good breakfast and then asked for more.

An old girl cat who is still able to hop on the love seat, drink, eat, pick up her rubber ball, and use the litter box is not quite ready to go. We cancelled the home visit. We thought merely to make her comfortable enough to die at home, but it seems she will continue to do well enough for a few more days. She is something of a celebrity at the clinic where we took her as a stray kitten 19 years ago. Her doctor had just opened the clinic a few months before. Frida is the last cat standing.

The cranes

For the first dawn of 2015, I got up early and drove 6 miles to the pasture where a flock of sandhill cranes spends its days during the winter. I drive by the pasture every morning during my commute to school. I was running a few minutes behind so I knew I would not be there in time to see them all land. About thirty or forty were still arriving as I stood by the fence. Among those who had already landed was the whooping crane, a real standout among the sandhills. "Does he know he's different?"  another birder asked me. Surely he doesn't need a mirror to know that. Both of his legs were covered with colorful bands to show how many people are watching his progress. He poked around in the grass alongside his grey cousins. I felt it was a good way to start the new year, watching him and hoping balance can be restored between human endeavors and the natural world.