I am spoiling our cat. She is elderly, mostly deaf and going blind. She’s got a constant runny nose that was finally diagnosed as asthma a few years ago. We recently had a bad scare and thought she was dying as we helplessly watched.
Long story short — an emergency vet visit brought up the probability of cancer and an emergency animal hospital visit said no cancer, but she has pancreatitis.
Apparently a cat with pancreatitis will eat, but the food he or she eats is not absorbed well. It can be a spell of pancreatitis or chronic. It can lead to diabetes. The vet said to feed her whatever she wanted to eat. Hence the spoiling.
She began turning her nose up to the Science Diet canned food for mature cats, so I bought Royal Canin because she liked the sample the vet gave us. I also gave her some low-sodium tuna in water — the kind people eat — and she liked that. We also give her the skin off the salmon we cook because we don’t like the skin and she loves it. It seems to make her chipper.
The other day she began turning her nose up to the Royal Canin food and I suggested to Dean that I buy fish for her and cook it and freeze it. He shook his head and said that at some point she would only eat caviar from the rarest of sturgeons in a country that does not trade with the U.S.
Okay, he really didn’t say that but I bet he wishes he had.
I did buy some inexpensive frozen fish and will cook it for her — but she seems okay with the Royal Canin again. Dean says she’s got me trained. I think he’s right.
So, on Monday afternoon I got a phone call. The ID on the phone display read:
FIND TOTO
I didn’t answer, but later was curious and listened to the message. Notice that the message did not say “This is a message from your neighbor Cokie”. However, I made a note to be on the lookout for a scared looking black lab if and when I was out and about.
That evening just before I left for Alexandria (to teach a class on document accessibility the next morning) I checked the news on my phone. I have a “Bethesda, Maryland” section on Google News and noticed that the Baltimore Sun had an article about Cokie Roberts and her lost dog, Katie. I was a little amused that a newspaper like the Baltimore Sun ran an article about a lost dog. Then I was kind of excited to learn that Ms Roberts lives within a few miles of me. The article (and the message) mentioned Bradley Boulevard which is very close to me as well as Walt Whitman High School (not the one from Room 222) which is where my children went to school.
I now wonder if perhaps I have passed her in the grocery store or cut her off while driving on Wilson Lane. Truth be told, I would not recognize her. She’d have to accidentally put her groceries in my cart and then launch into a monologue about the benefits of avocados. (I know she is on some TV news program now, but I’ve never really watched it.)
While I sincerely hope that Katie is quickly and safely returned to Cokie (I can call her that, she’s my neighbor and Mary Martha Corinne Morrison Claiborne Boggs is a mouthful) I do find it amusing that it has made such news around here.
Clutch Cargo Lips 