And now for something completely different....

It’s been a while since I’ve written about our furry kids. So tonight it’s all about Molly. Right now she’s curled up in my lap, making her quiet urffing noises while she works to breathe and I work to not cry on her.

Molly & her sister Pixel were born on Father’s Day 1996. So June this year, we hope that she will reach double digits. You see, last Tuesday, Molly was diagnosed with congestive heart failure.

Last weekend, I had noticed that it looked like she was working hard to breathe, but discounted what I saw, thinking that I was overreacting. Then Sunday night, in stealth mode, she got into the pantry and scarfed some old deli turkey out of the garbage. Monday when I fed everyone breakfast she didn’t show up. I went looking for her and she acted like she had a bellyache, so off we went to the vets on Tuesday. If you read about last week’s misadventures, you might have noticed a casual mention about Molly. What you didn’t read was the reason why it took me so long to see a relatively light load of patients was because I was spending so much time on the phone Tuesday, between calls from Michael & calls from the vet. By 11:30am, I’d talked with Dr. S and he was concerned that we were dealing with a cat that was in CHF from hyperthyroidism. Amazingly enough given medical costs these days, for the sum of $311 Molly got a pretty stellar work-up. So when I talked with Michael at my lunch, I just knew that right then was not a good time to bring up the cat when he was focused on the fingerprints....

Fast forward to late Wednesday afternoon. Spoke with Dr. S again and Molly’s labs came back. “It’s good news & bad news.... The good news is that her thyroid levels are fine. The bad news is that this means the CHF is all a heart problem.” So the game plan was to put her on medication, (which I picked up twenty minutes after I got off the phone with the vet,) and to see how she did over the weekend. I’m going to call him Monday morning and we’ll see how it goes. She has hated being pilled x 2 each night since Wednesday, so tonight we crushed the pills & mixed them into some wet food. That worked tonight, but I’m not hopeful that will be a long-term solution. Thursday & Friday I thought that this was helping, her breathing slowed down and her appetite picked up. Last night, today and tonight, I’m not so convinced. She has been clingier lately; she wants to be on me, held, cuddled, consoled. Her sides just cave in with the effort it takes to breathe and she is starting to have that wasted look. Tonight I really started to become afraid that she is going to die, and she is going to die while I’m in Russia.

What is literally heart breaking about this situation is that Molly is truly a special cat. Of course I’m not biased. Molly & Pixel have the honor of having been my babies. My 3am feedings, wash their butts to poop, totally dependent babies, who convinced me that human babies at home was not my calling....

They were my 5 week old kittens that Michael & I brought home because we didn’t want them to go to the pound. Long story short, we got to meet them when they were two days old and Molly was the runt of the litter. I fell in love with her then and had her name picked out a few hours later. We already had Milo & Tessa, so one more didn’t seem like a problem. Pixel was sort of an afterthought, but she has never held that against us. When they came home, Pixel weighed one pound, but Molly was only ¾ pound and was too small for shots. It was the summer between 1st & 2nd year in med school and I was busy cleaning & renovating the house Michael & I were living in. So to keep an eye on them, I wore overalls a lot & would just park them in the big front pocket. They’d spend the day riding around with me and the bonding took. That is until I got to residency. Molly has never forgiven me for being away from home for 40+ hours at a time. Nights on-call, I’d phone home at 9pm to talk to Molly. For months the nurses thought I had a 4 year-old daughter at home named Molly, and really I did. She has climbed the pecking order and is the only cat that could stare at Milo and make him back away. She has ruled this family with an iron paw in a velvet glove, until recently when Tucker started to take over. She has had her moments of complete mental unhinged-ness which calicos are known for. But she has always been fundamentally a sweet cat and I feel totally blindsided by this recent turn of events. When did it happen that she got older? When did it happen that she went from kittenhood to geriatrics? And why didn’t I notice?

So you see, I didn’t exaggerate when I named this blog “Not such a tame world....” And so instead of mostly joy & happiness about finally getting to Russia, there is instead a very sizable serving of bittersweet at our home....