A couple of people here mentioned that I haven't posted in a while. I'm still on Hive everyday, doing curation but it's been an exceptionally cold and miserable winter, made worse by electricity blackouts. I also went back to work as soon as we were out of hard lockdown and I'm working more hours, which is good because times are tough but I lost my cat Tom in July and lost any desire to write much. After some time off to process and a lot of digging in the garden, I feel like writing again.
What happened to Tom? I posted about it here and things got rough with him very soon after the first round of blood tests suggested declining kidney function. I was supposed to get his urine tested to confirm kidney disease but every time I took him to the vet, his bladder was empty. Tom ate at first, then stopped, then needed an antinausea injection to eat again and ate relatively well for about 10 days and then stopped eating again. I tried various combinations of a couple of different antinausea medications and appetite stimulants but none really worked well and it was clear from his behaviour that he felt nauseous, even if he wasn't actually vomiting. There were more vet visits but after a month the vet pointed out that he had lost over 10% of his body weight and said that it was clear that other processes at work. I couldn't disagree and stuck to my original decision not to put him through lots of expensive, invasive testing. The vet agreed with me that it wasn't necessarily wise because we could get a diagnosis but that didn't guarantee that his condition would be treatable. She told me that it wasn't fair to let him starve and that was inescapable. We made one last effort to get him eating but it didn't work and so the heartbreaking decision was made.
It's always true that you never realise the hole that an absence makes until it happens although Tom once was missing for 5 days before he returned home and it was then that I realised that although I often thought of him as annoying, I would miss him terribly. He really was a quirky little cat. Very much the underdog amongst the large alpha males in my household, he nevertheless knew how to make his way through the world.
He's buried in the garden, where he enjoyed spending his time and I have been building a rockery close to where he rests: the physical labour has helped me work through my sense of loss. I'll show some pictures of that tomorrow - it's almost finished. Here's a very overexposed picture of a certain little furball soaking up the winter sun just before I started digging, 3 weeks before his passing.
