And the gods of animals said… give this woman a break!

After Ginger’s death, I started looking at my remaining four cats with renewed scrutiny, not wishing to be sneaked-up-on by another sudden meltdown. Three of four have physical challenges: colon blockages, restricted sinuses, inflammatory bowel disease… it’s all worrisome and keeps me hopping. But, I thought, thank god for Big Mike! My beloved goofball and only cat who is easy, youthful and loving.

Then I took another look. Was it my imagination, or did he seem a lot thinner than he used to be? And what about his occasional bout of barfing? And his incessant hunger, despite only picking at his food?

I brought out the scales that I purchased a few years ago when I had sick kittens. Mike weighed in at around 11 pounds. I emailed his vet to see what he weighed a year ago at his last checkup, and my jaw dropped at the response. A year ago he was 17 pounds.

You get so used to seeing them every day that a loss of four ounces is imperceptible, as is the next four ounces, and so on, until suddenly you can feel his spine like you would that of an old cat. But Big Mike is young, right?

I scrambled to find his records. Mike was trapped in the parking lot six years ago, after being attacked by a predator that shredded the fur on one of his front legs, and severely scraped his face and eye.

  Big Mike, pre-trapping

With his life in the balance, getting an accurate sense of his age did not seem that important – the vet could only guess that he could be around 2 years old. That would make him around 8 years old now: no longer a youngster but hardly a senior.

This is the narrative I was telling a different vet six years later as I dropped him off last week for tests that would hopefully explain his extreme weight loss. It was the beginning of a harrowing day. Almost as soon as I left him, Mike began open-mouthed breathing, his heartbeat accelerated to a dangerous level, and the clinic scrambled to give him oxygen, fluids and tests. It was a white knuckle day for me with a lot of tears; I could not believe that only three weeks after losing Ginger I could easily be losing another.

I picked up a very drugged Mike at the end of the day, despite the vet’s admonition that I should consider leaving him there in case he was headed for heart failure or a stroke. I wanted him home with me. And if he was angry at me for putting him through the grueling day he didn’t show it, and slept off his hangover on my lap, his impossibly long legs dangling like stilts,  completely unaware of the lump in my throat each time I thought of all the things that could be wrong with him. Heart disease? Cancer?

The call came the next day: Mike has hyperthyroidism – which would explain the weight loss, the decreased appetite, the accelerated heart rate. And it can be treated with a daily pill. I almost couldn’t believe it – after my string of losses in the last few years (Claude, Iggy and Ginger at home; myriad ferals) I just assumed this would be another huge one. After a week on his pills, Mike’s appetite has improved and he hasn’t barfed once.

The other big surprise that has come from this: it seems Mike is much older than I thought. The vet tells me this disease only strikes cats in their early teens. Which means if he is approximately 12, he was already around 6, not 2, when I rescued him. It seems my narrative about Mike is changing. He is not my strapping, healthy, young guy; he is approaching seniorhood and has at least one major issue. Do I love him any less? If anything, I love him more, knowing I have fewer years with him than I thought I would.

For now, it’s enough to know that this is one bullet I’ve been able to dodge. And that this episode ends in hope rather than despair. Thank you, Saint Francis, for the break!