Monday was a bad day. We took Georgie to the vet as he seemed to be a bit unwell last Tuesday and Wednesday, off his food and drinking a lot of water. He seemed to recover Thursday and Friday, ate a whole deli chicken (!), two cans of tuna and a a couple of cans of cat food, and was brighter and more active, but went downhill Saturday and Sunday and just slept and drank a lot. A trip to the vet on Monday revealed he had end stage renal failure and there was no hope for him.
We had seen no particular signs of renal failure, like we did for Sophie, and his blood tests were normal for an 18 year old when he had them done six months ago. But now some of his renal markers were so high they were more than the machine could measure. One marker was so high the vet said he'd only seen that three times in his long career. One kidney had atrophied and the other was inflamed and irregularly shaped, either due to cysts or cancer. Georgie had been masking the symptoms and the changes were so slight we didn't see them until too late.
The vet was clear that even with drip hydration and renal food he had no more than a week or two at the most, so we took the painful decision to have him put to sleep. We spent some time talking to him and stroking him, with him purring all the while, then held him and stroked him as he was injected. He was gone in less than a minute. The vet has arranged to have him individually cremated and when his ashes come back he'll sit on a shelf with Fleagle and Sophie so they can all be together once more.
We were looking at pictures of him yesterday afternoon and found the first one when we discovered him in our greenhouse all those years ago. The date? 16th August 2006. He left us 15 years to the day he met us.
-oOo-
Although he had a new home, he never settled, ending up being fed by four different people and roaming and fighting because he had never been neutered. In the end his current owner simply locked the door on him one day and let him roam. We were told by neighbours he was now an unwanted stray and to do something with him because he annoyed everyone by stealing food and climbing in through windows to fight with their cats and spray.
He eventually he settled down and turned into a lovely cat. We stuffed him full of high protein food so he put on weight and got a glossy coat. CP tried to find him a home and after several attempts that fell through Martin asked if we could keep him. Turns out they had been having some lovely moments together first thing in the mornings when Martin was making his sandwiches (I believe ham may have been involved!) and he believed he could be a nice addition to our home. The relief in the CP Officer's voice was palpable as she scratched another difficult case off her books.
He was never a cuddly cat you see and all the potential adopters wanted lap cats. No-one likes a spiky cat. He really didn't like being touched, but over the years we could stroke his head and back, always at his instigation though or we got bitten or scratched. Sometimes he would come on our laps or partially sit on us and we would hardly dare move, recognising it was a privilege to be needed by him at that point but understanding he didn't want a big deal made of it.
He was a big fan of claiming objects to sleep on - a piece of paper, magazine, book, iPad, plastic bag, didn't matter. He liked it all. Even better if it was something you'd just put down for a second.
Sometimes he didn't look comfortable at all, perched on top of some teetering stack, but he was determined.
We think he liked to claim places that had no previous cat smell, a dominance thing maybe. If something new came in the house he would sit on it, and if it could be slept on he would.
Things changed for him in January 2018 when he was 15. While out one morning in the paddock he was trampled by one of the sheep, breaking his leg in two places and leaving him needing an operation for a permanent plate to hold the pieces together.
We couldn't understand how such a streetwise cat could have been surprised like that, until a few months later when we realised he was stone deaf. He never heard them coming. His other senses became super acute but he started doing that wailing that all older or deaf cats do when they are trying to locate you.
Then in the winter of 2018/19 he started being much more attentive about food and stealing off plates.
At one point he launched himself at a lump of cake being held by my brother-in-law, who was looking after him while we were in Australia, desperately clawing at it and biting a chunk off. When we came back we took him to the vet straight away, and he was diagnosed with an over-active thyroid and put on medication twice a day. He was not a cat that could be wrapped in a towel and pilled so we had to be crafty and sneak it in his favourite meaty sticks twice a day, and even then sometimes he simply sorted the pill from the treat in his mouth and spat the pill out. Then we had to change tactics and find another treat, like cheese or perhaps even leave him for an hour and try again. We never wanted it to become a battle ground - he was his own cat and pushing him could very easily turn it into one, with us on the losing side.
What we didn't know at the time was that an thyroid medication can make even mild age-related kidney disease worse. He probably did have a bit - the vet said his renal markers were borderline but that was quite common for an elderly cat with ageing kidneys. At that point perhaps we should have put him on renal food and phosphate binders as a precaution but the vet was reassuring about his blood results being ok for his age so we never did. I know for the future now - the first sign of thyroid issues and on to renal food our cats will go.
In October 2019 Fleagle died and Georgie reacted poorly to her absence. He was very clingy with us, off his food, and kept going round and round the house yowling and looking for her. They tolerated each other and a truce developed between them over the years so his reaction was a surprise. He stopped going outside for anything more than a sniff of the wind and suddenly started to shadow us from room to room. Having another cat in the house made him feel secure so we found him Snowy (renamed Missy), a three year old Maine Coon who looked up to him and let him be boss. He calmed down and was himself again.
Over the last couple of years, every morning he would come to the paddock with one of us when we opened the chickens, find some soft leaves or a nice mole hill for a toilet stop, eat some grass to help him bring up his furballs, wait for us to finish then wander back to the house with us. Then it was time for a head scratch, his pill, some food and upstairs for a nice long nap during the day, usually wherever I was as he liked to be near someone even if he was sleeping. He would reappear downstairs at around 5:30pm for a breath of fresh air and some more food. In the evenings, he was a fiend if I had my jigsaws out. He loved sleeping on the jigsaws and in the boxes, and I was forever trying to stop him rucking up whatever I was working on and picking his hairs out of the pieces.
Both Baldrick and Missy sensed something had changed yesterday when we came back and sat cuddled up with us on the bed. Baldrick now has the run of the house, rather than Georgie-free zones, and has been wandering around looking for him. After his run out in the morning yesterday and today he zoomed up for a cuddle on the bed, then raced off back outside.
I had never considered a future without Georgie, never once thought of a day without him. He was a quiet, strong, stoic cat with a stubborn personality and a mind of his own and just seemed to go on forever.
Our mornings and evenings revolved around his medication and food choices, so they are now eerily empty of purpose. I have no furball for a companion any more and that will take some getting used to. Baldrick and Missy are young, three and five years old respectively, and are very active cats that like the outdoors so they're rarely in.
I will miss him dreadfully. Rest in peace my darling little boy. You were so loved.
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