I'll start at the beginning. Arnold came into our lives shortly after we were married. I was apprehensive about getting a cat, but Tony had one before and we lived in an apt. too small for a dog, so we decided to go to the humane society just to 'take a look around'. We instantly narrowed it down to two cats. The first was meathead. As the name implies, he had a huge noggin. Tony held him and we both liked him. Then the cat next to him came to the front of his cage and meowed. He was smaller than meathead and looked friendly and cuddly. So Tony opened up his cage door, held him to his chest, and the cat rubbed gently against his neck, as if they had already met. But he probably used this seduction on everybody. Tony was hooked, and I knew we were going to take him home. We told the people at the front that we wanted "Jingles" but we had to go to the ATM to take out the $35 bucks and stop to get the neccessities for our new friend.
In the car we tried hard to come up with a new name....Jingles just didn't fit. One of us said Arnold....as in Swarzenager...he wasn't that big of a cat, but for some reason he just looked like an Arnold. So it stuck, our new companion would be called Arnold.
He was shy and tender. We took him straight over to Tony's parents house to show Deb and Dan-o. Then we took him home....that's when it happened....Deer ticks. Crawling out of his ears!!!!!! I was so disgusted. Of course we had no idea what they were, but I just knew we needed to take him back. We'd had him all of an hour and already he was defective! But Tony disagreed and said that we would just have to take him to the vet in the morning. But a whole night of these grose large bugs coming out of his head and into my house? So I hid our toothbrushes and put him in the bathroom. Small enough space. Ok, dumb moment I must put in here, when I called the vet the next morning they told me to put them in a plastic bag. I was so frantic I thought they meant to put Arnold in a plastic bag. This didn't make any sense, wouldn't he suffocate I asked? That's when the kind receptionist told me no, not the cat, the bugs, so we can see what they are. Deer ticks they were. And getting them all out required him to be put under. And they ended up taking out 8 or 9, this was on top of the 4 or so that had already come out at our house. Poor kitty! And after this, $$$ keeps running through my mind. But Dr. Calista is an amazing vet and since we had adopted an adult at the humane society she did everything for less than $50. In his follow up she said his googly eye might have been caused from having the deer ticks. Or he'd been kicked in the head, by maybe a farm animal (it made sense that he would have been a barn car), or maybe even hit by a car at some point. It didn't matter, deer ticks, googly eye, shark tooth that hung over his lip, it all just added to make him even more unique. I was in love. And as you can see from the pics, as our love for him grew, he grew too! He was curious and liked to bite. But we were ok with that, we knew he did it out of love and to check and see if we would still love him even if he was bad. He loved to lay in the sun on our balcony or claw at the rug outside.
Arnold developed stones about 1 week before we moved to MD. But looking back, he'd been having symptoms for a couple of months. We took him to a vet in Roswell (we were staying with my parents) and they fixed him up. I figured he was just anxious about the move. But the problems never ended. For a full year and a half. We were in and out of vet's offices. I was always trying a new vet because maybe they would have the cure....hoping for a cure other than the $1000 operation that was basically a sex change that would allow him to pee out the stones easier. Vet bills, more vet bills, and we were always shoving pills down his throat. He was trying new diets, we were trying to help him lose wait, only feeding him twice a day. He hated this, he'd always been a self feeder, and obviously very good at it.
So a year ago he got sick again. I was in the kitchen and he came and squated next to me, cried and tried to pee. But it was only blood. He was desperate. He had never once gone anywhere outside of his litterbox. But he was smart, he knew what he was doing. So I shoved some more medicine down his little mouth and made an appointment at once again, another vets office. But we had already made the decision. The appointment this time was not to get him more medicine. It was to end the pain and the suffering. Our heart was absolutely broken. How do you put down your friend? Who were we to say that we all had to stop trying? But we just tried to rationalize it. He was suffering. Even when he wasn't clogged up, we were shoving medicine down him, and when he was sick he was staying at the vets overnight to get a catheter put in and shots, and x-rays, and there was no way that he could understand any of this, only that he was in pain. After we would bring him home he would have trouble controlling his urine, so it would just come out. And we could tell that he hated the way he was smelling, so he would hide from us. We would have to pry him out of wherever he was to clean him up. It wasn't fair anymore. We had invested so much and so had he. There wasn't even a guarentee that the surgery would work. And no way did we have $1000. So I took him in and held him. And cried and cried. I was standing there with his head in my hands as they gave him the shot to end his pain and his little life was over. Tony and I's life together had always had him in it, and now we were alone.
A year ago, and still as I sit here I can't help but sob. I miss my friend so much. He was a huge part of our life. I know most people say, he was just a cat. But he made me laugh, made me cry, had so much personality and filled me happiness. I still think about him and all his antics. We needed him as much as he needed us. Did we do the right thing? I don't know. And I can't think about it, because it only hurts and gets me nowhere.
We're thinking about getting another cat soon. But I told myself not to love this one too much, because things may not work out. And I really don't think I can ever love another cat as much as I loved my Arnie.
Front of our hotel, along the Grand Canal
