Cats that is.
Seven hours ago, we had to put Tessa to sleep.
As much as I feel surprised, I don't. I was peripherally aware that this week she was having a hard time eating, and she was vomiting on a daily basis. Not really that unusual for her this past few years. Every few months she'd have a spell like thisand then bounce back. We attributed it to a belly mass that was found in 2004. She was 10 years old then and our household policy is that once the furries reach double-digits no extraordinary or invasive measures are required. So when she'd have one of these spells I had injectable nausea medication to give her, and she'd bounce back.
Only, today at about 1pm, it was blatantly obvious that she wasn't bouncing back, but she was rapidly declining. She couldn't balance to walk. She'd fall over and her paws would all stiffen. She wanted in the window to soak up the sunshine and after I put her there she fell off the window sill. Eventually, she reached the point that she wanted to just be held. So about 2:30 I called Michael to let him know that Tessa wasn't well. Then I called the vet to see if we could get worked in. Shortly after that the seizures started....
As best as I can tell, her belly mass was bigger. With not eating well this week, 5 days of vomiting, and yesterday & today not much oral intake at all, I think she was in full-blown renal failure & was uremic. She certainly had changes in her mental status and seemed like some of the extremely elderly patients I had taken care of with similar situations.
At 14 years 2 months, Tessa claims the title for the longest living being whom I've been directly responsible for, besides myself.
And so this is Tessa's story....
She came into my life at the sprightly age of 12 weeks old, directly because of Michael. She was the first Christmas present he ever gave me, the first year we were dating. I had moved into my own apartment over that Summer and was terribly lonesome because I had had to leave the family dogs back home with the family. So it was the first time I had been without any furries. Michael's cat, Milo, had convinced me that cats could be cool and for the first time ever, this stalwart dog person considered taking on my own cat. Within a few weeks, Michael & I were found at the pet store that our future brother-in-law worked at. They had gotten in a collection of kittens & Michael was excited for me to go pick one out. After a great deal of consideration, my choices had been narrowed down to two. The first was a pretty looking black & white cat who purred like a freight train every time that I held her. The second was a solid grey boy who was feisty & wanted to play with everything when I picked him up -- he was a wiggler. So I went back & forth multiple times, but eventually the black & white kitten's huge purr won me over & she was my choice. She also had a splotch of black across her chin that made her look like she'd been drinking chocolate milk. I didn't take her home that night because BIL was going to make sure she had her medicals done, and that she'd been freshly bathed & groomed. Michael then went whole hog-wild stocking me up with everything kitten that I'd need to care for her.
Within the week, BIL got his part done and we met at Michael's grandmother's home for me to get her & bring her home. She was in one of those cardboard carriers & she wanted nothing to do with that. So much so that she figured out how to escape and settled in my lap for the car ride home. That first weekend actually found us staying with my parents in my old room because I went home on the weekends to work my pharmacy technician job. She recoiled some about the barking dogs, but she wasn't particularly upset. The dogs were tremendously interested in the new smells from my room, but the weekend flew by and then she & I headed to our home at our apartment.
This was Tessa & I when she was 14 weeks old.
Her name Tessa was short for "La Contessa Tessalon Perle". She carried herself with a very regal tone, so she needed a title of some type. And at the time I was working my way through college as a pharmacy tech. The two pills that I thought were the prettiest were Chloral hydrate and Tessalon Perles. Even though the chloral hydrate ones were a deep green, translucent capsule, it just didn't seem like the right kind of name. The tessalon perles were a lovely translucent golden yellow sphere and added into her name, it just sort of rolled together fluidly. So Tessa it was. In residency, one of my fellow residents was named Tessa and I had to bite my tongue often to not keep telling her that my cat was named the same.... Tessa the resident always seemed miffed that she shared a name with a cat -- but really she was a dog person....
I sometimes really missed those days when it was just her & I. That first winter she would sleep under the covers with me. At least until 2 am, when she'd get up & play with her beloved "snowball" toy. It was a white rabbit fur covered ball with jingle bells that hung from an elastic cord mounted high above her head. She could make quite the racket and wake me up. With just a little bit of training, I learned to put the snowball to bed, before we went to bed.
She was a delight & joy and helped me look forward to going home to the apartment instead of feeling so lonely. She was my shadow when I was home, although the semester that I took CVA [Comparative Vertebrate Anatomy] and had to dissect a cat, she would give me a wide berth until I'd showered off the "dead cat" smells. She slept on my textbooks while I studied and most definitely absorbed more organic chemistry than I ever did. I only had a 5 inch TV that we'd watch E.R. on every Thursday night and she'd sit with me watching every bit of activity. When I ate a bowl of after-dinner-mint ice cream from Braums, I had to sit on the kitchen counter to keep her out of my bowl. And she adored buttered spaghetti that she stole off my dinner plate. Otherwise, with Tessa, unless it came from a container clearly labeled "for Cats" she'd turn her nose up at it. She particularly liked sleeping on my sweatshirts & she could make a nest out of them very easily.
She was the cat who I held & danced around the apartment with on March 5, 1995, minutes after I finished my congratulatory phone call from the Dean of Admissions at the medical school I would later graduate from. She merely meowed when I told her that her mom would finally get to be a doctor. She was the cat I held in my brand new long white coat for pictures on my first day of internship. And she was the cat who snuggled with me in my office every chance she had when I was in there.
Five months later she & I moved to a new apartment closer to the medical school. This one was on the second floor with a fabulously thick tree just outside the bedroom window. She could finally bird watch to her heart's delight. She was just shy of her first birthday & still had a mischievous streak. Because I was gone for such long periods of time every day, she got good at making her own entertainment. She kept track of where I stored a jumbo pack of rubber bands and one night I returned home to find 5000 rubber bands strewn from one end of the apartment to the other. And the bag was still intact except for one small inch-wide hole at the bottom. She had painstakingly pulled out each rubber band & flung it around the apartment until she decided that she needed a new one. After that, we got a beta fish so she could have "cat TV" while I was gone. She became quite the naturalist between the birds & the fish.
About a year later we moved in with Michael & Milo. Tessa never did like Milo. At least for her part, she decided that they were sworn enemies. I think it went back to when we had tried to introduce them when she was only 14 weeks old and weighed 4 pounds and Milo was this gigantic, orange, 15 pound Maine Coon who pounced on her because he wanted to play. She was so not amused, and I guess never really got over that experience. So for years she merely tolerated him and she would self-limit her space to usually be my office, or one certain window or table, just to avoid him and any other cats she didn't approve of. Turns out that Tessa was very biased about who she would associate with. She only approved of other animals who were black, or white, or grey, or some combination there of. Two cats we had were her close buddies when we lived in Corpus, but they died in rapid succession just before we move back to North Texas. I think she was as heart-broken as I was at losing them. She also was fond of my brother's dogs when they came to visit. Kona is the white American Eskimo & Mia was the black mixed breed. When they would stay with us, penned in the kitchen, we'd routinely find Tessa hanging out on the counter visiting with them. Even when every other cat in the house had taken to hiding under our bed. So that kind of gives credit to the idea that animals have personalities & quirks too, just like us.
Milo & Tessa:
During medical school, someone attempted to break into the house we were living in. That was the one & only time that Michael has ever paged me with "911" in the phone number. By the time I arrived all the cats were accounted for and many hours later I noticed that Tessa seemed to be keeping her left eye closed & couldn't open it. When I went to touch her face, blood was on my fingers as she pulled back. She had multiple cuts that were hidden by the darkness of the black fur on her face. Minutes later Michael, Tessa, & I were headed to the emergency vets. She had the cuts on her face, but the worst injury was a shard of glass that had gotten lodged in her eye. The e-vet gave us medication & eye drops to use and the next day our regular vet got us an appointment with a veterinary ophthalmologist. For the next few weeks it was touch & go. Dr. Munger was hopeful that we could save the eye, but maybe not the vision. So she & I made the trip to North Dallas 2-3 times a week and finally she started to heal. Her vision was never the same, but after a couple of years to adapt, she started to make jumps more confidently and she'd hang out on windowsills again. Long story short, based on the BB pellets I found across the room and fragments of window glass with BB holes, we suspected that the kid next door to us saw Tessa lounging on the windowsill in my study & he decided to use her for target practice and she got caught in the shattering glass. Then to cover up the BB holes in the window, he smashed it with a golf club, messed up stuff on my desk & tossed the golf club in our back yard. Other than circumstantial evidence I wasn't ever able to prove what happened, but a few weeks later I came across him standing in his yard pointing at my windows with a pellet gun. At that point I got Michael's shotgun & pointed it at the kid until he backed down & went away. I never did seem him back there again. Lesson learned and a cat scarred for life....
Tessa lived in six different home with us. Moved a total of seven times. Was an intrepid car traveler. Loved & lost three companions and two others who weren't favorites in the past 5 years. And this past August she surprised us all by celebrating her 14th birthday -- unfortunately we curled her whiskers from the heat of the candles on her cupcake. For the past two years she's been my steady room mate in my office. It's the one room that I could easily close her off from the others so that they wouldn't harass her. And I got very used to our evening routine. I'd come in after Tab got to bed & Tessa would hang out either on my desk or in my lap as I checked e-mail, surfed the web & played with my photos. At 14 years old, the equivalent of being a 98 year old human, I should have realized better that this wouldn't last forever. I just wasn't expecting how lonely it would feel in here without her. The other cats don't want to come in right now, and I can't bring myself to start cleaning up all of her things & her fur-drifts off of the floor. Maybe tomorrow, but not right now.
She was stubborn and more than a little hard-headed.
She shed a lot. Year round.
She had a tendency to pee when & where she felt like it, hence the lovely stained concrete floor in my office.
She & I adored each other and she will forever be my "first cat"....
Tessa, "La Contessa Tessalon Perle"
August 23, 1994 to November 7, 2008
