Cattown, August 2009

This is the summer that Cattown has become a feline hospice. First we lost Tip, on June 4. I brought him home after he had been hospitalized for several days, and he spent his last days on the screened front porch, watching the activities of the neighborhood as the life of the household went on around him. Now my baby girl, my Kitten-Boo, is dying of liver failure. She was hospitalized over the weekend and given IV fluids and had an ultrasound that displayed the cavitation, or hole, in her liver, that is probably cancer. After discussions with veterinarians about quality of life and just how much we might expect to gain by doing exploratory surgery on a cat who is almost fifteen years old, I brought her home on Monday afternoon with three medications and special food -- no surgery. Now, hospice care. She spends her days in her two favorite places -- in my lap or on the porch. She's getting her meds down with a good slathering of whipped Parkay -- messy but effective. I bought her a can of her favorite treat, known in this household as Fhhtt-fhhtt but known to the world as Reddi-Wip (the real stuff, not that fake Cool Whip), and she had a couple of fingerfuls this evening, licking it up just like she did in the old days when she was feeling good. (I'll put an occasional fhhtt-fhhht in my coffee cup, just like they do in those $5 cups of coffee at the coffee houses.)

I brought three cats with me when we moved from Georgia in 2000; I call them the Georgia Gang. Tip, who died at age 13, and Kitten-Boo were two of the three. Morris, at age 14 and a retired barn cat, is holding his own. When he came to New Orleans he got a new addition to his name: Morris, the Magnificent. Those who are from New Orleans will get the pun. Those who don't, well, do a search for Morgus the Magnificent or Dr. Momus Alexander Morgus and maybe you'll get a link to a song about him ("Morgus, the Magnificent"). Morgus was a New Orleans TV personality back in the 1950s through 1970s who is still living today and whose shows now run on a public access cable channel. But I digress. Morris the Cat is still with us and in apparent good health. Long may he wave.

It's been a very strange summer, with one celebrity death after another: David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, and others. I leave it to you to figure out which of these people I, a longtime journalist, miss the most.

We persevere through the long, hot summer here in New Orleans. The peak of hurricane season is almost upon us, as is the fortieth anniversary of Hurricane Camille, which I believe made landfall either August 16 or 17, while the rest of the world was going to Woodstock. Camille was a small, intense storm that did very little damage in New Orleans but just about wiped the Mississippi Gulf Coast off the map. Yet it was nothing compared to Katrina (aka She Who Must Not Be Named), which DID wipe the Mississippi coast off the map. And four years later they still have a long, long way to go.

As we await The Peak Season (and thanks be to God, the high altitude wind shears have kept anything from forming in the Atlantic basin so far), I take care of my beloved Kitten-Boo in her last days, here at the Cattown Hospice. I don't think she will make it to evacuation season, and perhaps that is a blessing.