Like a lot of multi-cat households, we never intended to have five cats at once. The most Mom and I had were three, and five is a different beast altogether. For one thing, the babies pee so much! We have two cats who do not use the litter box, and the remaining three keep the Litter Robot running all day and night. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a cat person; I’m an animal person. Our current roundup is as follows:
Ms. Piper Paws (featured image) is a promise kept. I was finally ready for another cat after Sprinkles died, and I wanted another tuxedo. “Kitten season” starts around April, so we were looking around for tuxedo cats before Mom went back in the hospital. She was really excited to have a kitten in the house again. After she found out she wouldn’t be coming home, she told my husband to “get [me] that cat.”
The cat gods must have heard because within a week after losing Mom, we found three tuxedo kittens who were up for adoption through a rescue shelter at the pet store. I told my husband which one I wanted from a picture, and he got her while I was out with my cousin and aunt. I named her Piper Paws. Piper is a character from Charmed, and Paws is my mom’s initials.
When I opened my birthday gift and card and had my cleansing grief meltdown, my husband ran out of the room and came back holding teeny, tiny Piper. He shoved her against my chest and said to her, “Do your job,” which made me laugh. My husband can’t stand seeing me sad/crying and tries everything to make me feel better.
Piper needed a playmate. She had fun torturing Mom’s cat, Ashes, but he was 15 years old and just not as active as a kitten, so off to the shelter we go! There was a bundle of gray kittens in one cage, and I never had an all-gray cat, so I chose one. He got some medicine before we left, then diarrhea’d in his box on the way home, which was several miles away from the shelter.
Unfortunately for him, his first moments at home were getting a bath in the sink. Since my husband loves The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, and I was going with a witch and wizard theme, I named him Gandalf the Grey. We call him Gandi or Gander.
A couple of years or so ago, Gandi came out of the litter box and started flipping and flopping all over the floor. I freaked and yelled for my husband, who recognized it was a seizure because our nephew suffers from them. It was traumatizing for everyone. He had a seizure after every single bowel movement or attempt at a bowel movement, four to five times a day.
I felt so helpless. The vet had no answers and prescribed phenobarbital, which kind of seemed to help, but I could find zero correlation between seizures and constipation in cats or humans. I started giving him Dulcolax or olive oil. After months of exhausting seizures and no answers, he stopped having them. He also stopped being constipated, but I still have no answer as to the relation between that and the seizures unless he had some blockage that he finally unblocked.
After taking in a black kitten who loved rolling around on our porch, I wanted another black cat because the porch kitty, Merlin Haggard, was the bestest cat I ever had. I went through Facebook Marketplace this time and found a roughly 6-week-old black kitten about an hour from us. He is such a sweet cat and loves cuddles. I named him Phineas Nibbeus Black, from Harry Potter.
A few weeks in, we noticed something was a bit off with Phin. He wouldn’t chase the laser light but would chase everyone who was chasing the laser light when they ran by him. He was very clumsy and would run or jump into his siblings frequently. I started suspecting that he couldn’t see, and I recalled the vet never checked his vision like they did with Merlin at his first appointment. (I don’t know why they didn’t.)
I did some at-home vision tests on him and was even more convinced, but I knew for sure when he knocked out four of his teeth one day. He liked to jump up on the bathroom sink for pets when someone was in the bathroom. He miscalculated and jumped up and hit his mouth on the lip of the counter when I was in there.
We checked him and saw he was missing four of his little middle teeth. He hasn’t jumped on the bathroom sink since and relies on us putting him up there or he gets up there by jumping onto the tub and walking across the toilet tank, which my husband taught him by tapping and knocking on the surfaces.
Because of his blindness, Phin is very spoiled and very much the baby. He sleeps up by my face and only on my green blanket. After Merlin died, he started wanting held during the day. When I’m working and Phin wants held, my husband will yell for him and he will go into the room with him and lie on his chest. He and Merlin were the best of friends and I think he still misses him, as we all do.
Cari R Esta 