In loving memory of Heidi, our little nose bandit; March 21st 2003 to September 1st, 2021.
TW: Pet death, human grief.
On July 15th, 2003, Andy and I rolled into New Mexico after driving for three days from North Carolina, where he attended grad school. With us in the car were our two kitties, approximately eleven year-old Thena and four year-old Gail. We settled in to the new apartment and, as one of our first moves, ordered a new couch since or old one was not worth moving. The morning of the 29th, the day the new sofa was scheduled to be delivered, Thena suddenly fell from my desk into my arms, twitched a few times, and died. She had shown no signs of any distress, and it was devastating to both of us -- me alone with Gail while Andy was at a conference.
There was a pet store nearby (Clark's at Juan Tabo and Menaul, for anyone local who is reading this) and I had noticed they had a room in back full of cats wandering around -- no cages. With Andy still several days away from coming home, I went to visit what I would come to know as Kitty City. No one was there, so I was petting random kitties, when a kitten wandered over. She was a four month-old tabby named Honey, and whether she climbed on my lap or I picked her up, she was fishing for her forever home, and she apparently decided that mine would do. Throughout the day she hopped off my lap to get snacks or drinks and to kick Caesar (a huge battle-scarred softie with the kittens) out of a kitty bed way up high on a shelf. Every time, though, she returned. Finally, the very last time she returned, she fell asleep in my lap, and I was hooked. When her foster mother, Monica, came to check in on her siblings and her, I was sitting there with Heidi on my lap asleep and simultaneously reeling me in.
Monica at first thought I was someone else who had expressed interest in Honey, and when I told her I wasn't she decided on the spot that she liked me better than the other person. Her instincts were good, because the other person never checked in on the application. I talked to Monica for a long time, including after Clark's closed for the night, and ended up crying in the parking lot as I described what had happened to Thena. When Andy got home that weekend I persuaded him to come meet Honey at the organization's weekly adopt-a-thon, and she charmed him as well. I don't have her original adoption papers, but I believe we put in an application that day, and it was quickly approved (little did I know that Monica was one of the two leaders of the organization). We were trying to decide on a name and had narrowed it down to Heidi or Holly. We were on a _Red Dwarf_ kick at the time and Andy pointed out that a (male) character on the show was called Holly. That and our classic tabby loved high places, and we decided on Heidi, the little mountain girl in the book _Heidi_.
It took some feather toy diplomacy and a week or two, but Gail and Heidi became friends and were soon curling up together. Heidi assimilated into our lives vey quickly and proved to be as mischievous and silly as kittens are wont to be. Early on she got the nickname "nose bandit" because she loved licking, nipping, or otherwise assaulting peoples' noses, something she never grew out of. She ended up spending eighteen years and change with us. She didn't so much replace Thena as she helped assuage the grief. In a lot of ways she was like Thena: she was talkative, bold, friendly, and had a thunderpurr that could be heard throughout the apartment and later the house, but she was also her own kitty. She's actually older than our house; they finished building it in May of 2004 and she was born on March 21st of 2003.
When we took Heidi to get her teeth cleaned for the first time at the Vet, they were so bad that eleven needed to be extracted. She would lose two others over the course of her life. In her mid-adulthood she ended up becoming very heavy, to the point of her belly dragging on the floor. I believe at one weigh-in she was nearly, if not over, fourteen pounds. We tried to put her on a diet and she didn't like it, so much so that she stopped eating. She dropped weight rapidly and developed fatty liver, not necessarily in that order. We caught on and tried to fix it, but she never ate her old food again and even after we began treatment she was losing weight, eventually getting down to eight pounds. She had to have a tube inserted in her neck so I could feed her that way, and thankfully after a while even began eating the food we were giving to her. She eventually stabilized into a healthy weight of nine pounds and change.
A few years ago I noticed she was scratching her ears a lot and her head began tilting. She was diagnosed with vestibular disease, and for the rest of her life her head remained tilted. It turned out she had ear infections behind her ear drums, and had to have them popped to clean it our, plus had to have a lot of antibiotics. Eventually, though, she recovered aside from the head tilt.
Heidi was our ambassador. Whenever anyone came into the house, she walked up and demanded tax in the form of petting. She wasn't pushy when some people declined to pet her, but she rewarded those who did with copious purrs. With Andy and me she was super cuddly, though we were relieved when we got CPAP masks so she couldn't chew on our noses at night. Even then she found ways to awaken us when her automatic feeder ran out. She loved being what Andy called a "cave kitty" and what I called "going under cover", wherein she would burrow under the blankets and snuggle with us. She wasn't always undercover, though -- some of my favorite memories of her involved her wedging herself between Andy and me and purring while we both petted her. She would stay like this for hours, the three of us just drowsily enjoying each others' company. She also liked it when Andy or I would pick her up and hug each other with her in the middle. She wasn't a full-time lap kitty, but she wouldn't turn down a lap either.
Heidi began showing signs of arthritis in her early teens, and her front paw had a tremor which only I ever seemed to see. We tried various medications for the arthritis, but none really worked. When her adopted brother developed cancer Andy put some giant Lego-style bricks together to make a set of stairs up to our bed, and while Sean never used them, Heidi did. In May of this year she began refusing to eat. The Vet prescribed the same food we gave her when we were tube-feeding her, and I began feeding her, then taking a nap, all with the door closed because her two little sisters were circling her like sharks. Heidi would eat some of the food, come and cuddle while I napped, then eat more when I got up.
In August I noticed her having even more trouble walking, with her back legs noticeably askew. She also stopped eating as much, and Andy took her to the Vet to address that. She weighed in at six pounds. The Vet injected some fluids subcutaneously and gave her an appetite stimulant and antiemetic. She also ran some blood tests. That evening Andy noticed how she dragged her legs and asked me to call the Vet the first thing in the morning since the office was already closed.
While Andy slept waiting to drive Heidi to the appointment the Vet called. She said she knew we had an emergency appointment for Heidi's legs, but that her bloodwork had also come back and it looked very bad. Stage four kidney failure bad. She said we might want to factor that into any care we gave to Heidi from that point forward. When we got to the office she told us everything we wanted to know, and we were considering putting her to sleep as soon as we could find a Vet who did house calls.
Then, she pulled off a miraculous recovery after the Vet gave her more fluids. She began eating again and perked up, and was more herself than she'd been in weeks, maybe months. We arranged for Andy to take her to the Vet daily for subcutaneous fluid injections, and the Vet said she would show us how to do it at home. She told us what to order from Chewy, and I placed the order on August 31st. Then, overnight, she got much worse than she had been. The Vet had prescribed an appetite stimulant to be rubbed into her ear, and I gave her the first dose that evening. At about ten she came into my room, climbed up into bed with me, and stayed until I fell asleep. She did not do the things she would typically do when she wanted to be fed, and since it was supposed to take a few hours to take effect I didn't think much of it. I did get up around two to see if she was hungry, and she didn't even take any polite nibbles. She didn't want to stay in the room, either.
When I woke up later that morning she was nowhere to be seen, and I texted Andy to see if she was upstairs with him. She was; she had climbed the stairs for the first time in months and although she wasn't interested in being on the bed or being held, she did spend several hours on the floor letting him pet her. In retrospect, we are certain she was telling us goodbye. On the way to the Vet to learn how to give her the fluids I told Andy we might need to make a decision. I didn't have to tell him what the decision was; he knew.
Once we got to the Vet's office she plummeted. Her usual Vet was out and one we had never met before was going to show us how to do the fluids, but we quickly ascertained that her quality of life was not good and that she might even be suffering. I began trying to call all of the home-visit hospice Vets on our Vet's list and found a bunch of disconnected numbers or voice mail messages, only one of which was ever returned. I also tried to contact the Vet who had put Sean to sleep in our house, but she was off that day. Meanwhile, Heidi was getting worse and her breathing was labored. We decided to let her go in the Vet's office rather than bringing her home, especially since the hospice Vet who called back had no appointments available until the next week.
They took her back to put in a catheter, and Heidi almost didn't survive even that. The Vet suggested we say our goodbyes quickly, and as soon as we had she injected the euthanasia. She didn't want to wait any longer than that because Heidi had declined so badly. Heidi died with Andy and me both holding her and crying our eyes out. We had decided to let the Vet make the arrangements for her cremation, so we didn't get to bring her home. As with Thena, Gail, and Sean before her we had a private cremation so we could get her ashes back, and asked for them to make a paw print for us to keep. The Vet shaved off a bit of her fur and cut off some of her whiskers when we told her how Sean had left one of his whiskers on Andy's desk.
Later that evening Andy went to the drug store, and on the way home he saw a brilliant rainbow. Sadly he had not brought anything to take pictures with, but he said it was one of the most vibrant he'd ever seen. Today when we picked up her ashes from the Vet's office, the people who did the cremation included the rainbow bridge glurge, and we ended up crying in the car (in a parking lot, not while driving). Andy told me that we were finally bringing her home.
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callicrates gave Colin his evening kibble, which he demolished, and then he and Andy played with one of his interactive toys. Andy picked Colin up and put him on his lap and he purred, then went over to sit on Andy's laptop.
