May 26

Julie was fairly normal last night. She ate. She sat on my lap. Aside from the excessive licking of her genitals from the UTI (which I will keep monitoring, but should subside in the next day or so), she seemed to be 100%. 

But this morning, something is again amiss. 


She does not sleep on the bed with me. Okay. 


She’s not there, meowing for breakfast, when I wake up. Okay.


She’s not there, flicking around the bathroom when I hop in the shower and brush my teeth. Okay. 


I go downstairs to the kitchen, and there she is. She meows to greet me. Okay! 


But, that’s it. She has no interest in her food. No interest even in her Squeeze-Up treats, which she adores and have been a fantastic vector to administer her pain medication. I shake a treat in her direction; normally she would approach me like a bear to honey. She does not react. I come closer. She scurries to a spot under the couch. 


Okay. 


I leave her food in her bowl, mixing in the Squeeze-Up treat and her medication. 


Can we have two consecutive good days? Is that too much?


Perhaps this is the remnants of the UTI, making her sluggish and affecting her appetite. 


Or perhaps it’s, you know. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Julie Reminders

Julie reminders abound.   In the downstairs bathroom trash can, I can still see an empty Squeeze-Up treat packet. It’s the last thing she ever ate.   I opened the adjacent closet, and see two cases of her prescription cat food , Royal Canin Urinary SO. I still haven’t decided what to do with all that food. Feed it to the dog? Lord knows she ate plenty of Julie’s food over the years, but she’s on her own bougie diet these days. Return it to the store? Maybe, but I probably don’t have the receipt. Toss it? That seems like quite a waste, especially considering how much this stuff cost, and what a nuisance it so often was to acquire.   And the reminders are in the absence of Julie-related things, as well. The white space on the ledge where I fed her. The vacancy in the sun room, where she once had her downstairs litter box. The voids in the various spots in the house where I usually found her, or where I’d try to find her when I couldn’t.   And, of course, the subtler di...
Read more

Fourteen Days

September 7. It’s a Tuesday. I’m home, in the middle of a long weekend. Yesterday was Labor Day, today and tomorrow are Rosh Hoshanah. So I’m home, and it’s a slow, sad five days in a house without my Julie.   She died two weeks ago. Fourteen years with her, fourteen days without her. Somehow the latter feels longer than the former.   I keep thinking that I hear her. The house emanates sounds it didn’t used to make. I keep thinking there’s a rustling sound from the next room over, or that I hear her jumping up on the table in the other room. Lord knows why, but I always get up to look to see what I’m hearing, and I’m always a little surprised when she’s not there.   And she keeps popping up in my dreams. The old Julie, that’s the one I dream about. Full of life, never far away from me.   It’s not just me, for what that’s worth. Angela said the same thing the other day — that she keeps thinking she hears Julie. Maybe it’s her spirit, still in the house, saying hello. ...
Read more