I was waiting for good news before I blogged again. Sadly, it escaped me until now. So I need to get this one post over before I move onto better days. I'm going to be brief, as the enormous knot in my throat makes it a very hard post indeed.

My siamese cat, the one that features on my logo at the top, died Tuesday. She stopped eating about a month ago and a trip to the vet, and another vet, and a truckload of scans and tests and biopsies later confirmed that she had very advanced liver cancer which may or may not have moved to several other organs already. On top of this, her one lung was collapsed and the other one almost filled with fluid. How does this all happen without us noticing? I honestly don't know. She never had breathing problems and she was active and purring and her old grumpy self. It was only once she stopped eating and rapidly deteriorated to a very, very skinny cat, that we noticed something was wrong.

I syringed fed her for a number of weeks. Last week she started eating by herself again but just before the long weekend I realised that she was starting to loose some of her spark and will to live. She came through the weekend, mostly clutched to me, zipped up in my fleece jacket like a little kangaroo baby. She was still purring, but sadly this is often a way to ease the pain. Around Monday she started losing control of her body functions and we realised it was time.

This was some of the saddest days of my life. The day before and the day after. I still see her little ears moving either forwards (a happy sign) or backwards (not so happy) and me smooching them until they start moving forwards. She was queen of the household. The dogs were petrified of her. I loved her to bits and she loved me back. I got her when she was merely four weeks old and could fit in the palm of my hand. The breeder wanted to get rid of the kittens for some reason as fast as possible, and I took this little thing from its mom, an elegant and graceful chocolate siamese that came around to "approve" me while I was holding little Nino, and its dad, a fierce and wild seal point siamese cat that probably has never been cuddled in its life. And she was the perfect blend of the two. Always graceful, always neat and tidy, yet with a wild tomboy streak which gave her so much character.

She only accepted two animal friends in her life: my other siamese from childhood, Thai-Thai, which passed away many years ago at the ripe old age of eighteen, and our current kitten/teenager cat, Boo. Here are four pictures of how I want to remember her. Two of them with Thai, one of them cuddling on the couch (Nino at the right), one where Thai was giving Nino one of his famous "headlicks" (all animals in the house had to endure the headlick, sometimes for hours on end). One of her with Boo shortly after they made friends, which took the best of two weeks as Nino had to check this kitten out first (Boo passed with flying colours, of course, as she is a darling of note). The last of Nino is in her signature pose - tail neatly curled around, ears forward and head tilted.



I add one more, but this is not the one I want to remember, but it is the last photo of her hence important. It is taken a few days before she passed away. Despite being so frail, she kept climbing this tree, and it was actually a branch that we were going to prune away. Needless to stay, the branch will stay as a memory, that will still have many a cat (and otherwise) sitting in it in the future.



I'll miss you my darling cat. I hope you and Thai are having a nice cuddle and headlick somewhere where there is no more pain and tiredness. My heart was and is truly broken still, but that is the way of pets. In the end, it is your life and not your final few days that mattered. Or so we tell ourselves, to make things easier. I miss you damnit. It was far too soon. I wish you were still around. I wish I could have done something. It was so incredibly hard saying goodbye.

I promise this is the last sad post about death and dying. Tomorrow will bring good tidings to this blog. If you sneak into my Flickr account, you may get a preview, but just remember nothing is confirmed until... gosh when? Four weeks? Six weeks? Twelve weeks? Forty weeks? Ok, we'll settle on four weeks, then, which is tomorrow. Hang in there.