Elsie

The last 4 days have not been good ones my friends.  

Elsie (our kitty) has always been more of a throw-up-y cat than I was used to, and Michael and I have known since we had her spayed that she was a special needs kitty (she only has one kidney and her organs were not exactly in the normal places, she had a broken tail and a club paw).  

But for 15 years she has been such a love-y and good kitty.  

Last Friday she started throwing up.  Michael and I didn’t even realize how much until we started talking about it at bedtime and realized how much stuff we had both cleaned up.  

The last few bits I cleaned up had a pinkish tinge.  Elsie stopped eating and drinking on Friday, and her behavior changed as well.  

Instead of sleeping for 18+ hours a day  :~), she just couldn’t seem to settle..she kept wandering around and wandering around…it seemed like she was trying to get comfortable.  

So, we made a Monday morning visit to the vet and said good-bye.  To say it was heart wrenching is a vast understatement.  Michael and I had only been dating about 2 - 3 months when we first met Elsie…so she has been ‘our’ cat from the beginning.  One of my ECQ quilting buddies had rescued a pregnant cat and we told her we were interested in a kitten.  When we went to pick out the kitten, we took Chloe (my dog at the time).  All of the kittens ran away from Chloe and hid behind a screen, but after a couple of seconds…. Elsie came back out.  She was still hissing and spitting and stabbing with her paw, but she came back out so she was the one.  We named her Elsie after the Borden cow (ok, if you get that reference, you are officially old  :~).  She managed to get along with 2 dogs (both Chloe & our current dog Cookie), to play and chase and mock fight and cuddle up with.  

As a matter of fact….she climbed up on Cookie Sunday night while I was reading in the living room.  

She weathered the 2 day trip when we moved from Connecticut to South Carolina like a pro, and loved exploring our new house.  I am so glad we enclosed the deck last year so that she had a new place to explore and to visit the ‘outside’ world.  She always, ALWAYS found the newest, soft thing to lie on…generally the latest finished quilt.  And she was like the ‘princess and the pea’….always finding the deepest pile of soft things to take a nap on.  

So basically,  Michael and I have spent the last 4 days loving on Elsie as much as we could…but with each day it became more and more apparent that this wasn’t something that was going to get better.  So, yesterday morning we said our good-byes…

and we are bereft.