Tigger, April 1990 - June 19, 2010

In previous blog entries, I may have made mention of my cat, Tigger. I acquired Tigger in 2007, when the previous owners of Tigger moved into a subsidized complex called the Bronfman Buildings in Montreal. Pets are not allowed in the Bronfman Buildings under any circumstances, so these people had to find homes for three different cats. As I already had Ouija living with me at the time, I agreed to accept one of the cats. I ended up agreeing to take Tigger, who was at that time 17 years old. One of the reasons that I took such an old cat was that there were fears that it would be difficult to find a home for him. The other two available cats were each about four years old, and many people do not want an old cat.

So, after the second Passover Seder of 2007, which I attended at the apartment of the people who were giving me Tigger, I walked home with Tigger in a carrier.

I soon reached my apartment on Beaucourt Street, and opened the door of the carrier. Tigger went out, and immediately hid in a lower kitchen cupboard. He remained in that cupboard for about two days, coming out only to get food and use the litter box.

Eventually, Tigger got tired of living in a cupboard, and got used to living in a new apartment. There was, of course, the issue of which cat would be the dominant one.. At first, Ouija, having been there longer, used to swat at Tigger whenever he came near her, Eventually, Tigger began to swat back. Finally, a point was reached where they could sit a couple of feet away from each other without fighting.

At first, Tigger seemed a bit more rambunctious than Ouija. He still had claws on his back paws, and I often felt them when he was crawling all over me. As time went on, he seemed to become more gentle. I remember him coming onto my bed a day or two after my father had died, and I felt almost in a state of bliss with Tigger being beside me.

In late May 2008, I came home one day to find that Ouija had died, and now Tigger was the only cat that I had.

Tigger remained with me through the troubles
of the following year, and he moved with me to my present apartment on Bourret Street. He eventually got used to the new apartment.

But Father Time eventually began to catch up with Tigger. This past April, Tigger turned 20 years old. He was already starting to walk more slowly, and he seemed to be dragging one of his back legs a little. Around the first week in April, one side of his face puffed up, and one morning, I awoke to see blood all over his body. The veterinarian I brought him to concluded that he must have gotten a puncture wound in one of his cheeks, and the swollen cheek must have been the result of the wound getting infected. The infected area had then opened up, leaving him all bloody. He was given an antibiotic shot, and I was instructed to apply cold compresses to his cheek three times a day. Further tests revealed that his blood sugar was elevated, so from then on, he was given Purina DM cat food, which was designed for diabetic cats.

When he got home from the trip to the veterinarian, Tigger was very tired and only wanted to sleep. However, within a few days, he started to perk up. The new food must have agreed with him. He began to gain a little bit of weight. He suddenly acquired new urges to climb up and jump onto things, even though his coordination was a bit off. He started wanting to sleep on top of a table. Eventually, he wanted to spend much of his time on a shelf in a wall unit which was behind the table.

But the improvement in his condition was not permanent. One day, I heard a thrashing noise behind me. Tigger had fallen off the shelf and into the space behind the wall unit. He was having trouble extricating himself from there. A few minutes later, he managed to crawl out on his own.

Tigger seemed to remain about the same until about a week ago. A friend visiting me noticed that Tigger looked a lot scrawnier than he had looked a week earlier. On Thursday night, July 17, Hydro - Quebec had scheduled a power outage for 11 PM. As I was struggling to finish with the computer before the power went out, I heard a thrashing noise behind me. Tigger had again fallen behind the wall unit, and was lying face up on a folded cardbord box. At that point, the power went out, and everything was plunged into darkness.

After the power went on again, I was able to extricate Tigger from his predicament. I then removed everything from behind the wall unit, and pushed the wall unit closer to the wall. I hoped that there would now no longer be any room for Tigger to be able to fall behind the wall unit.

But now, I noticed that there was a gap between the wall unit and the table in front of it. I didn't know if I should now move the table closer to the wall unit as well. Within a couple of hours, I had my answer. There was a noise, and Tigger was now on the floor under the table. He had presumably fallen from the table. The table was now moved closer to the wall unit.

Friday, July 18, was an extremely hot day, and I had a lot of trouble moving around. So I did not find it strange that Tigger didn't feel like moving around much either. I went out for a few hours in the evening, and came home to find Tigger curled up on a sofa chair and resting or sleeping.

I eventually went to bed myself and slept for a few hours, awaking at about 5:30 AM. I went to look in on Tigger, expecting him to have gone out onto the balcony when it became daylight. He was not on the balcony. I eventually found him sprawled on the floor near the sofa chair where I had last seen him. I had at first not noticed him in the still-darkened living room. I picked him up and sat in the sofa chair for a while with him. I was already crying, although I was not sure why. Eventually, he started to squirm around, and I put him down on the floor.

I went to bed, but I couldn't sleep. I went again to check on Tigger. He was sitting on the floor in the same place, but he seemed more alert and was lookin around.

I went to sleep for a few more hours. When I awoke, Tigger was no longer in the living room, and had apparently gone onto the balcony. I started to make myself breakfast, and then I saw Tigger stumbling into the living room. There was blood on the side of his face which had bled two months earlier, and there was also blood on his paw. I could not figure out what had happened. I am on the fourth floor, and the balcony is not attached to a fire escape. Could Tigger have been attacked by a crow?

The veterinary clinic where I had gone previously is open on Saturday mornings, but I did not know if the veterinarian herself was in that day. I had also been planning to go out that morning. I then remembered the instructions I had received on using cold compresses on Tigger. I used a cold compress, and then cradled Tigger for a while until he started to squirm. I put him down on the floor, and then noticed how he would try to stand up and then flop down on one side. He still seemed to be able to move around, as I started to daydream and then suddenly noticed that he was now several feet away from me.

He was now resting comfortably, so I decided to go away for a few hours and administer the cold compress when I got back. I would probably have to bring him to see the vet on Monday, as the clinic is not open on Sundays.

I went out, and immediately felt the heat outdoors. I felt that I had probably made the right decision in not attempting to bring him to the vet on such a hot day.

I arrived home around 2:30 PM. Tigger had now moved onto the balcony. He was on his side and breathing rapidly.

I had no idea what to do. I went indoors to drink some water. Before I could do anything, the phone rang. It was some idiot telemarketer trying to sell me something called "Solo". I screamed at the telemarketer and hung up. Within a minute, the phone rang again. I let the answering machine take it. It was obviously the same idiot, as he did not leave a message.

By that point, I felt that the best thing to do was to bring Tigger indoors and try to get him to drink water, even if I had to hold him up over the bowl to do so. I went back onto the balcony. Tigger had stopped panting, but he did not seem to be breathing. The flies were buzzing around his head, but he exhibhited no reaction to them. I brought him indoors, but there was no longer any movement from him. Tigger was gone.

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A few hours later, I spoke with a friend on the phone. She had had experience in dealing with another cat in his final hours. She felt that Tigger must have been having a series of mini strokes over the last few weeks. His falling off the wall unit and the table had probably occured because he had lost his sense of balance due to the mini strokes. The bleeding on the balcony may also been caused by a stroke rather than by an injury. And one last stroke probably killed him just as I was getting home. I am not a doctor or a veterinarian, so I don't know whether or not this conclusion makes any sense. And it is not feasible to autopsy a dead cat.

Farewell, sweet Tigger. In pacem, requies.

 

Ouija - in memoriam

Ouija

Passed away on Friday, May 16, 2008.

I'm not sure how many of my readers on Multiply knew about my cat, Ouija. I had once blogged about her on my Yahoo 360 page, but that was over two years ago. Essentially, in the summer of 2004, renovations were being done on the apartment I live in. During all of the month of August, the period of the renovations, all the windows and doors to my apartment were left wide open. I, personally, only used the apartment for sleeping during this period, and when the workmen came to work on the apartment for the day, I would leave the apartment and go to the Westmount Library, where I would learn how to use the computer.

At one point during this period, I began to notice paw prints on the bathroom sink. At first, I attributed these paw prints to squirrels coming into the apartment through the open windows. One day, however, I came face-to-face with this strange tortoiseshell calico cat prowling around my apartment.

At first, I tried to chase the cat out of my apartment, but she kept standing right outside and meowing to come in again. I eventually let her stay. She eventually became tame enough that she would jump on top of me when I was lying in bed so that I could rub her. She liked being rubbed for about ten minutes at a time, after which she would make a sort of disapproving growling noise to say she had had enough rubbing for the moment. But growling was all that she would do. In the nearly four years that I had her, she never bit me once. She was probably the most gentle cat that I ever met.

She ended up with the name “Ouija” for the following reason:

One day, when she started to eat the food that I had left in a bowl for her, when she was still quite wild, she made a sound that sounded like “Wee-je”. So I named her “Ouija”.

Ouija lived in my apartment for nearly four years. After the first four months of this period, she became pregnant, and had a litter of one kitten. The kitten died at the age of two weeks old, and Ouija was spayed shortly thereafter. After the grief that Ouija felt after losing that kitten, I had no intention of allowing that incident to repeat itself.

In April 2007, I ended up with a second cat. Some friends were moving into subsidized housing for senior citizens, and the place did not allow any pets. So they had to find homes for their three cats. I ended up with Tigger, an orange-and-white male Norwegian Forest Cat, mainly because it's difficult to find a home for a seventeen-year-old cat. After a few weeks of conflicts, Ouija and Tigger eventually learned to get a long with each other.

Ouija's last day on this earth began quite uneventfully. She seemed to be behaving the way she normally did, expecting her morning rubdown. At about 2 PM, I had to go downtown to do an errand. Before I left, I looked in on the two cats. Tigger was sitting on the old sofa, while Ouija was lying on the floor near him. Ouija did seem a bit quiet, but I didn't take much notice of it.

I went downtown and returned home. I lay down to rest. Tigger jumped on top of me, and I fell asleep in that position. After a couple of hours of sleep, I awoke and realized that Ouija had not come in to the bedroom to see me. I went to check on her. Ouija was in the exact same position that she had been when I had last seen her at 2 PM. I forced myself to go into the living room and rub her body. I felt a stiff inanimate object. Ouija was dead and may have been so for several hours.

I put the body into a plastic garbage bag and brought it down to the SPCA so that they could properly dispose of it. I know it would have been more poetic to bury it. But I live in the City of Montreal, and they probably would not have looked kindly into people burying their pets everywhere and anywhere.

I will end this posting with a reprint of the original article I wrote about Ouija in late 2005. Goodbye, gentle Ouija. I'll miss you. Maybe even Tigger will miss you as well.

A Cat Story

This story may sound a bit strange. But it is definitely true.

I moved into the apartment where I am now living in 1992. For various reasons, it has always been disorganized and chaotic in here. Because of this, on every occasion when someone had asked me if I wanted to adopt a cat that needed a new home, I had always passed on the opportunity. Things were chaotic enough here as it is without me having to cope with a cat getting into everything. And so it went for the next twelve years until the summer of 2004.

The year 2004 began relatively uneventfully, until about the middle of the month of March. Then, one evening at about 9:00 P.M., I heard a knock on the door.

I opened the door, and found myself face-to-face with a woman whom I had never seen before. She said that she wanted to inspect my apartment. I was totally unclear at that point as to whether she had bought the building or was planning to buy the building, but I am not one to make trouble, so I let her look at the apartment. I could see that she was not too impressed with what she saw. I suppose I couldn't really blame her. I am not the greatest of housekeepers, and, as well, the apartment had had a chronic problem of water leaking into my apartment from the pipes above it, which by then had caused some of the walls to deteriorate.

A couple of days later, I managed to speak to the janitor. The woman who had shown up at my door had NOT actually bought the building, but she WAS considering buying it.

The next few months were kind of stressful for me. I had had problems with a previous landlord both in 1998 and in 2001. This previous landlord had been threatening me with eviction on several occasions, and I was afraid that I was going to be faced with a repeat of the same phenomenon. It didn’t help that this woman and her employees kept making repeated visits to inspect my apartment.

By a certain point in time, it seemed to me that the woman must have had bought the apartment, since she seemed to be coming around so often. I was still paying the rent to the old landlord, but I thought that this was just some protocol of the sale, where the ownership had not yet been legally finalized.

At the end of June, assuming that the woman already owned the building and that she would probably try to evict me, I went over to Project Genesis to find out what my legal status was. I was told there that I could not be evicted without there being a hearing at the rental board, and that the whole procedure would take at least a month or two. So I was not in any danger of being immediately dumped into the street.

Heartened by this information, I went home feeling a bit more confident. But I had barely had one day of relaxation when I ran into the janitor again. It turned out that I had completely misunderstood the situation. It seemed that the building had NOT in fact been sold, and that it was still owned by the old landlord. But the old landlord wanted to sell the building, and the condition of my apartment was one of the main obstacles to the building being sold.

At this point, I was told that I had to clean up the apartment immediately, and that it would be inspected in a few days.

I managed to do some sort of clean-up, though it required my staying up all night for a couple of nights in order to do the clean up. The landlord showed up, inspected the apartment, said that it was clean enough, but that it would now require some renovations. He said that the renovations would not take place until August, and it was then barely the beginning of July.

Time seemed to go by faster than it should have, and before I knew it, it was already August. Various workmen started to come into my apartment, bringing the materials needed for the renovations. Soon the renovations had started.

I began to find the renovations a major inconvenience, and I especially became very upset when I saw my belongings being moved around in order to accommodate the renovations. The janitor advised me to stay out of the apartment while the workmen were working in there, in order to make it easier for everyone concerned. So I ended up spending all my days at the Westmount Library working on the computers, coming home only after 7:00 P.M., when the workmen had finished for the day. My life continued on like this well into the beginning of September.

But now to get back to the main subject of this narrative – the cat.

At some point during this period, I started to notice paw prints on my bathroom sink. As all the windows were being kept wide open to air out the apartment during the renovations, I assumed that some squirrels were coming up the back fire escape and coming into my apartment through the bathroom window.

For a while, I didn’t concern myself about the squirrels. Eventually, however, after the workmen had finally finished the renovations, the situation with the squirrels finally began to get on my nerves. So one day, before I went out, I made sure that both the door to the balcony (which could be reached by the fire escape) and the bathroom window were closed.

I did not return home until the late evening, and when I came into my apartment, I was totally surprised by what I saw. Wandering around my apartment was a cat which I had never seen before. The cat looked more or less like the cat in the photo at the beginning of this blog entry (the photo in fact was taken from Google Images). I immediately opened the door to the balcony, and chased the cat out of the apartment.

At first, I wondered how the cat had managed to get into the apartment with both the bathroom window and the balcony door closed. But then I realized what had happened. There had been repairs made to the bathroom plumbing, and a panel on the wall in the hallway had been removed to give access to the bathtub plumbing. The cat had presumably gone through the opening left in the wall and had gotten into the space between the apartments, where it had probably been sleeping while I was busy closing the bathroom window and the balcony door.

Things were quiet for the next few hours, but then I heard a meowing noise coming from outside near the bathroom. The cat had returned and wanted to come back in again. Apparently, it had decided that it now lived in my apartment. Presumably, during the previous few weeks, every day around sunrise, it had been coming into my apartment through the open bathroom window, which opened right onto the fire escape. It would then go through the opening in the wall into the space between the apartments, where it would spend the day sleeping. Then, when the workmen had left for the day, it would come out and leave the apartment, either through the bathroom window or through the open kitchen door. By the time I got home, it had usually already gone out.

I let the cat in again, and it went into the space between the walls. I began to wonder if the cat had a reason for wanting to come in so badly. Perhaps it was a female and had a litter of kittens between the apartments.

The cat kept to the same schedule for the next few weeks. I left the hole in the hall wall open, just in case the cat did have a litter of kittens in there. Eventually, at one point, the cat went away and didn’t return to the apartment until three days later.  I decided that a mother cat would not leave her kittens alone for a three-day period, and I put the panel back into the hole in the wall. When the cat finally came back, it didn’t even notice that the hole in the wall was now closed up.

A few weeks later, someone gave me a small package of cat food, and suggested that I leave it for the cat and see if it would eat it. I tried, and the cat did in fact eat the food. I soon started to leave food regularly for the cat. I also set up a litter box so that the cat would not leave its calling card anywhere and everywhere.

So now I had a cat, even though it still behaved to some extent like a wild animal. It DID have a collar around its neck, but without any sort of name tags on it. So it MUST have had an owner at some point. But it still kept its distance from me.

At this point, I had not given the cat a name. But one day, when it went to eat its food, it made a sound that sounded like “Weeje”. So I gave the cat the name “Ouija”.

Finally, around November or December 2004, the cat finally came up to me and let me pet it.

Eventually, I found out that the cat was a female. And in March 2005, she was spayed.

So I guess that brings me to the end of my narrative. The only lesson that I guess I can learn from the whole experience is that life is to a large extent unpredictable. If you try to plan your life too rigidly, your plans will probably unravel, for that is the nature of the beast.

Sic transit mundi!

Monday December 19, 2005 - 12:33am