I’ve been quiet on this blog, but rest assured, I am still alive and working.

I actually took a break from all languages in order to deal with a series of events which continue to rough me up, beating me over the head until the Universe believes I am purged. Purged of what, you may ask? Apparently the will to live.

It started when my cat, Sydney died. I have grown up with cats, but he was my first big responsibility. Had I left him in the US, it would have been a death sentence. Georgia is overpopulated with unwanted cats and dogs, and there is no such thing as a no-kill shelter. Sure, some shelters advertise as no-kill, but as I understand it, they are overcrowded and filthy. If they aren’t adopted, the animals rotate out of the shelter, into kill shelters. I had three cats at the time, so all three came with me to Sweden.

Sydney, however, had been obese for a number of years. At one point, he weighed in at 23 pounds (~ 10 kilos). He had lost a lot of weight through veterinary-supervised dieting, but the damage done to his kidneys could not be reversed.

Then a catastrophic accident happened. One month after my first daughter was born. He jumped onto the kitchen counter, ever in search for food. He did not complete the jump, and his hind paw caught on a barely opened drawer. The force of the fall, and the weight of his heavy body as it hung from the drawer, destroyed the ligaments in that leg. The veterinary thought he would have to be put down, but me being the newly immigrated American, decided to spend a ridiculous amount of money to have his leg repaired. Later, his body started rejecting the surgical wire in his leg, and every time the excess had to be removed, he had to be sedated. Sedation is brutal for kidneys.

He then developed gingivitis, but the vets couldn’t treat it because it required anesthesia. Not being able to eat properly caused him to waste away. I had to have him euthanized because he was starving to death. He was 15 years old.

The very next year, my 16-year old black cat, Sheba, was the next to go. She also had kidney disease. Sheba was an “allergic cat” meaning that she was allergic to everything. While she was living in Georgia, the vet gave her powerful steroids to keep the allergies in check, but she still licked herself bald. I think these steroids probably damaged her kidneys. When we moved to Sweden, it took about a year for her to grow all her fur back. Vet tests showed she was also allergic to everything in Sweden, too, but because the winters are so long, her allergens were mainly reduced to household fluff (dust, wool, mites, dander, etc..). She had also developed an allergy to her rabies shot and eventually to her allergy shot.

I read that death by kidney disease is not so bad, in humans or in animals. You feel sick and then you die. It’s one of the better deaths because your suffering is limited to a general malaise.

Her death was a bit more difficult for me to process because the decline was faster than Sydney’s. It was one week from diagnosis to death whereas Sydney had several years. I think that was because Sheba had been sick for a while, but we did not discover it until she was dying. She was 16.

I have one cat alive from my old life in the U.S. Her name is Poplar, and she’s 18. Pops was diagnosed in February. She spends most of her time on my lap, demanding attention, or smacking me awake in the middle of the night.

I indulge her, of course.