Jankers

Mike and Brow Brow met back in 1995 when Brow Brow was hanging around Mike’s house in SeaTac, WA. So of course Mike fed her and eventually took her in. The vet told Mike that Brow Brow was around 2 years old. Today we said goodbye to Brow Brow. She was probably 16 years old – a pretty long life.

Brow Brow loved to relax. She would let Mike hold her belly up without squirming. Here she is relaxing on my lap.

She liked to sit on things like plastic bags and loved getting into boxes.

When Mike and I moved in together, Brow Brow was forced to share her space with Gracie. At first they hardly tolerated each other and by the end they might have liked each other. Here are a few pictures of them together.

In the last two years Brow Brow was very tolerant. Baby proofing and being measured for a cat door. Lots of chasing, hugs, and kisses.

One thing I’ll never forget about Brow Brow is her persistance when it came to waking us up to feed her. She started sometimes as early as 4am. When she was an outdoor cat, Mike used to throw her outside, so she would climb on the window ledge and scratch the window from the outside. When she was an indoor cat, she would walk just close enough to our bedside lamp to make it rock back and forth to wake us. When that didn’t work, she would climb up on the dresser next to the bed and jump down onto us, running across us at full speed – back and forth until we woke up. She scratched the door to get into our room. She’s been locked in the basement for the last two years. She figured out how to unlock the cat door. Then how to push the ottoman that we used to block the cat door. She was amazing!

We’re not really sure what was wrong with Brow Brow, but here’s what happened in a nutshell. She was seen about a month ago for her well visit. She had lost 2 pounds since the last visit, so they checked her labs. Her kidney levels were up so they thought it might be a kidney infection. We treated her with antibiotics. Since that visit she lost a pound and a half. Looking back, Mike realized that the cats were peeing more. And I realized that Brow Brow stopped eating her afternoon meal. Putting this all together the vet thinks it could have been kidney failure. Last Friday Brow Brow stopped eating and drinking almost completely. She would take sips of water, but only once or twice a day. And she wasn’t really moving around anymore. She never seemed uncomfortable, and we wanted to prevent it from getting to that point. We knew that we didn’t want to do anything aggressive, but it was so hard not to. I think we were both wishing even tonight that the vet would have some miracle cure. But he didn’t, and we said goodbye to Brow Brow.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 6:32 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.