I love cats. I have always had cats. I hyper-fixate on my cats. I am 100% Crazy Cat Lady and I’m damn proud of it. If you hate cats, that means you probably also hate women, and I inherently distrust you.
I wanted to write about my cats this week, because I am sick of writing about sad things and hard things at the moment. It’s also a story of how my brain works.
In 2017, a few days before Christmas, we lost our 16 year old cat, Bean, to cancer. Almost exactly a year later, we lost my other cat Scampy to intestinal lymphoma, at the age of 18. Of all the losses I’ve experienced in my life, cat grief is one of the most acutely painful things I have ever gone through. The memory of saying good bye to either of them will bring me to tears in a matter of moments. They were the first cats I’d had as an adult, and the witnesses to so much of my life. I still miss them terribly.
My husband and I were heartbroken, and for a while, we couldn’t imagine having a new cat. However, the thing you learn is that a cat-less life is depressing as hell, and by May of 2019, we decided it was time to bring some new babies into our lives. We wanted to very carefully choose our new companions, making sure we ascertained their temperament, condition, all the things.
What actually happened: I saw a tabby kitten in the window of an adoption van, quite literally ran into said van, scooped up said kitten, yelled “DOES SHE HAVE A SIBLING”, and then met her very tiny black sister. The whole thing took 30 minutes, I was handed a cardboard cat carrier and some paperwork, paid $120, and before I knew it, I had two tiny tiny babies in my house. We hadn’t even bought a litter box yet, which sent my husband on an emergency trip to Petco as soon as we got them home.
We named then Annie (black) and Talula (tabby). They were about ten weeks old when we took them home. They were extremely cute and filled us with joy from day one.
Both of my cats are amazing, but Annie is by far the sweetest, goofiest, and happiest cat I have ever had. She is always happy to see us, she is rarely in a bad mood, and she wants snuggles and kisses constantly. In fact, she will put both her little paws on my face to indicate that she wants her kisses. My Bean was my soul cat, and I never thought I’d be that close to a kitty ever again, but then Annie came into our home, and was like “Are you my mommy? Cool! I love you!!”, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.
Since my cats were Pandemic Cats, they are extremely spoiled, and I work extra hard to keep them happy. One of the things that makes Annie the happiest is the little cat tree we have next to our couch. She started using it from the time she was a baby, and nearly every day you could find her happily curled up in the bed on the top. Her favorite game was having my husband chase her into the cat tree. She would meow for his attention, and he would make “paws” at her and start moving towards her, and she would excitedly bolt, he would give chase, and she would wind up at the top of the cat tree for pets and play. It was adorable and hilarious.
One day a few months ago, we noticed that Annie was no longer asking for chase into the cat tree, and also wasn’t really sleeping in there anymore. It was bugging me that Annie won’t go in her cat tree. She loves that thing.
About a week or so ago, the cats and humans were on the couch watching TV, and I put on an episode of My Cat From Hell, hosted by the one and only Jackson Galaxy. I am a big fan of Jackson Galaxy, because that man knows his shit, and nearly every trick I’ve learned from him about dealing with cats has worked.
For some reason, watching this episode of Jackson Galaxy sent my ADHD brain into Connections Mode, where I have a bunch of cascading thoughts, and suddenly my dopamine rat brain gets excited, and then I wind up having a Brilliant Idea that I must execute IMMEDIATELY.
This particular episode of My Cat From Hell focused on a cat who had pica, meaning he liked to eat strange stuff. The cat on the show wound up eating a huge chunk out of a towel (!!) and he had to go to the vet. The most alarming symptom was that he had stopped eating. A cat who won’t eat usually needs to go to the vet, sooner than you think.
I started thinking about Scampy, my tabby boy, who also had bouts of pica. He had IBD, which is sort of like Crohns Disease in kitties, and eating random things off the floor signaled that he was having a flare up. Then I started thinking about when Bean got sick. She had stopped eating (while seeming otherwise fine), so I was syringe feeding her while waiting for her test results, and then she went downhill, so we rushed her to the emergency vet. It turned out she had cancer all over her tiny body. We had to let her go.
That made me start thinking about a recent situation where Annie had some kind of stomach bug and was vomiting a lot, and we were close to taking her to the emergency vet, because she was turning down treats. She even turned down parmesan cheese, her favorite people food. I remembered how grateful I was when she started perking up, and accepting her treats, and how she will always come running when she hears me say “ANNIE TREATS!”. She even lets me cut her claws without a fuss because she knows there are treats at the end.
I looked over to see Annie sitting at the bottom of the cat house, using the scratching posts that are attached to the bottom, and it dawned on me. I could use treats to get her back into the cat tree.
I can’t control much in this stupid world, but god dammit, I can give the cat tree back to Annie.
I sprung off the couch as if possessed by demons. I began to inspect the cat tree. I noticed that there was a fairly large gap in between the cat tree and the wall, a perfect hazard for a cat who has haphazardly launched herself from parts unknown. If there is one thing I know about Annie, its that she is a bit of a klutz. She has no idea she is not still a kitten, or - as the vet called her - “slightly over condition” (i.e. “a little fat”), so she has a tendency to not really understand where her body is in space.
I came to the sad conclusion that Annie must have, at some point when we were not home, absolutely eaten shit falling off the cat tree, probably overshooting and winding up falling behind it.
I hate this for her.
I ran and grabbed their treats and came back into the living room. Both Annie and Talula followed me. I summoned Annie to the cat tree. I put one treat on the very bottom of it, which she gobbled up happily. I petted and praised her. Then I put another treat on the second level. She jumped up on it, and she got another treat. After some coaxing, she very tentatively put her paws on the top level, and took her treat. She didn’t jump all the way in, but close. Talula, in the meantime, got treats for absolutely nothing other than being cute.
I honed in on this process, completely tuning out the show and my husband, who was absolutely saying words to me, but I had stopped listening. I continued to give treats and to analyze the positioning of the cat house. My husband realized that I was a goner and just went back to his phone. There was no talking to me. I was busy.
At some point, having given my cats a good handful of treats by this point, I sat back down on the couch. I didn’t want them to get sick, because cleaning cat barf is my job (my husband deals with the litter, its a fair trade), and I also didn’t want the shine of the treats to fade.
And then it happened.
For the first time in months, Annie climbed up to the top of the cat tree. She didn’t stay there long, but it was a success.
Ever since, I have been using treats to get her in the cat tree. She now happily jumps all the way up to the very top, and is slowly spending a bit more time up there before jumping down. I am hoping that, at some point, she will feel safe enough to return to sleep in her favorite spot.
It reminds me of how I felt when things started opening back up during the pandemic, and how I was scared to go outside, but the lure of a to-go margarita got me to put pants on and leave the house.
Sometimes, if we are scared or sad, we all just need the promise of a little treat.
When I had access to Animal Planet I watched "My Cat from Hell" every day. It was so interesting to see how he worked it all out! And I'm not even a cat person.
Your cats are very cute btw.
And my brother has a cat, a long haired Bengal, and he is super chatty. Day and night.
We adopted a black and white sibling pair of kittens 6 months ago at 10 weeks old. My husband’s cat was 11 years old when we met and lived to be 19 years old when he died in 2018. I always love cat posts.