Papa's Story

Papa was a silver grey and white tabby with a white tip on his tail, and he adored me. We had him from 9/76 until 1/93. He, like all our other cats, was a stray. My husband, Jeff, found him in a dumpster by our first apartment while he was trying to feed a hungry dog. He heard a noise, looked in, and came out with Papa. We called him that because our first cat, "Little One", became "Little Mama" after she had her three kittens (we kept them all, Lilli Honi, Sammi, and Gigi, and had them all spayed together as soon as we could). So we had a Mama, we needed a Papa to make it all "legit". Papa, also called "Sweet Pea" (and a lot of other unprintable names at times) was a very persistent cat. It took a month of clawing at our front door - trying to get out, for him to finally get the message that he was an indoor cat. I don't know how our neighbors downstairs stood it. But he was loved, as were all the others and in 1979 we all moved into a house. By then we had Kiki and Crazy Mama, too. You'll be hearing a lot about them as well. We also had 2 great dogs: Fonzi, our first baby, a lab/shepherd mix who loved cats, and McGee, another lab/shepherd mix, who tolerated, but never disturbed them.

In 1984, all our cats came down with a terrible virus. It looked just like the leukemia virus, but they all tested negative over and over again. My feeling is that it's a mutation of it that has yet to be found or named. We never had our cats vaccinated because they were indoor cats, and my cat book said when they stay indoors you don't need to vaccinate them. MISTAKE! Big Mistake, and please, please don't any of you make the same one. Now we vaccinate our remaining 12 cats (we've had 21 over the past 23 years) ourselves . That virus killed my Lilli Honi, the last 1 of the 10 to get it. We had what turned out to be a very bad vet then who really ignored and neglected her care. I learned a lot from that horrible experience, but no matter how much I've learned, it will never be worth the hurt and guilt I still feel, because of her loss. Anyway, back to Papa. I'll mention that virus a lot because I believe it left all my surviving cats with a suppressed immune system. Papa unfortunately was one of them. It affected him differently than the others, in that he didn't get it quite as intensely as they did. He just sneezed a lot (he was the 2nd to come down with it) and he spread it throughout the house with his sneezing.

In May of 1985, Papa started spraying around the house. He was altered in '76 and had not had a problem with spraying since then. So this was unusual. We tried restricting him to 1 bedroom for a few days - he sprayed as soon as he got out. The bottom of my playroom steps and my dining room wall were his targets. We tried a few more days, then a week. He was fine in the room, but as soon as you let him out, Bingo! he'd get us. So our new vet put him on Ovaban. Another mistake, I believe! About a week later, he began to seizure. He seizured several times that weekend. Then they put him on Phenobarbital. It didn't help. Finally, Valium helped him. But he'd still seizure about once a week, violent ones that would last about 30 seconds (he'd thrash and pee all over) and then he'd walk dazed for about 5-10 minutes afterward. He never got rid of them. We all just learned to live with it. He got varying doses of Valium and we learned to give it to him (usually about 2 mg) every 10 hours - sooner was too soon, and 12 hours unfortunately was too long. We'd set an alarm and run our lives around his pills. A pattern we were going to get all too used to over the years.

Papa loved, and I swear could say, "milk". He even had a little milk dance he would do. We had a rule: only once a day was he supposed to get "milk". We also had someone help us around the house a few times a week. Anyway, Papa could con milk out of all of us. By the time I'd say "I gave Papa milk today" to everyone, it was too late. He'd almost always conned it out of everyone else. He was a charmer, right till the end.

Papa died of liver disease. They said not cancer (as most of mine seem to get) at the age of about 17 (we always assume they're 1 when we get them full grown, and we had him for almost 17 years). He got very thin and frail and could hardly walk There's so much more to say about him, and them all. We kept a detailed diary of his seizures - all of them - dates and times, and pill schedules, etc. - I wish we could have learned from them, or that someone else could. I kept hoping to find a link - a reason why he seizured - what caused it, but never did. Also important, around October 1990, Papa stopped eating completely. We force fed him for 5 months. That's when we took him to see a neurologist. He said he must have had a brain tumor that spread to the part of his brain that tells him to eat, and it wasn't. So we force fed him about 70 cc's a day. After about 5 months one of our other cats, Tom, stopped eating, and we also had to force feed him (quite a coincidence?). We realized then that we weren't feeding Papa enough so we upped Papas food to about 120 cc's a day. After a few weeks, he started eating food again on his own. My theory is that he was being over-medicated (almost 4 mg a day of Valium) and was too tired to eat, plus we probably hadn't been feeding him enough. So he was shutting down physically. We fed him more, and cut the Valium to 2 mg a day (1 mg every 10 hours), and he came back to life again.

You don't know how many times we were told there was no hope, and to put him to sleep - but we didn't give up on him, and he lived for over a year after that, eating on his own and being OK, before he developed the liver disease. We put him to sleep on 1/31/93 when we realized how hard it was for him to just get around, and how tired he was. My husband would carry him to the litter box and hold him over his knee so he could pee in the box. He wouldn't pee anymore in the dining room or any place else but the litter box (except of course when he seizured).

He was a great cat, "my little darling". All the other cats best friend... We miss him so.