karmic calamity

Back yet again

Okay, so I dropped off the face of the blogosphere yet again.

July was freaking brutal, it seemed like every couple of days, another shoe was dropping, another piece of bad news delivered, and something else seemed to be ending. By the time my birthday rolled around towards the end of the month, I can honestly say that I didn't care if I had a good day or a bad one, I just wanted it to be over.

I'm so upbeat.

Anyway, since we're midway thru August, it's probably time to say goodbye to all the horrible shit that happened to me last month, wash my hands of it and move on to something positive. So that's what I'm gonna do right now.

So what happened in July that was so bad? Well, everything started when we noticed that Erlik, our cat/best friend/constant companion of somewhere around 14 years, had developed Lymphoma. He wasn't eating or doing his business correctly, so Rhonda took the little guy to the vet where they found a lump. After that, they wanted to do X-Rays, which gave them nothing conclusive other than "yep, it's definitely a lump". This took us a week to get confirmation that there was a lump.

We knew something was up, but the tests were inconclusive. We began to suspect that the vet that we were taking him to didn't know what he was doing, or even worse, was outright trying to scam us. So we found an excellent veterinary oncologist, who did an ultra sound and a tissue sample. A few days later we got the results-- Lymphoma, very advanced, and the most aggressive form of it to boot. He had virtually no chance of long term survival.

Now, this is where I admit that Rhonda and I are both a little superstitious about the weirdest things. She and I have been together 16 years. We got Erlik as a newborn kitten less than a year into our relationship. So for the last fifteen years, it's been Me, Rhonda and Erlik. The only constants in our lives have been one another and that cat. When we drove across the country to move to Arizona, it was the three of us, and what little we could cram into our 87 Chevy Nova on the road trip from hell...

I remember the first time we saw him. He was the runt of the litter. The underdog. The weird little cat with the black thing on his nose that got beaten up by the other kitties, and mocked by pretty much everybody who saw him. Nobody wanted him-- but we did. We wanted him for all of those reasons. He was like us.

Erlik liked to eat your hair in the morning, or pretty much anytime it smelled good. He loved to lick Rhonda's arms, and minty things like chewing gum or toothpaste (no we didn't feed him toothpaste, but you hadda see his reaction upon smelling it). He'd pull catnip and cat treats out of the bag with his paw, and he'd drink from a glass if you held it for him correctly. He was a smart cat, and but for a couple of vacations where we left him in Greg's care, I saw Erlik every day of his life.

I can remember moving into our new home this time last year, saying "this is the last place Erlik will ever live". I meant that in the sense that we weren't going to be selling this place anytime soon. Not that the little fucker was gonna die inside a year.

Anyway, he started going downhill quickly. He started isolating himself in the closet, finding dark remote places to lay. He stopped eating almost entirely, but he'd eat from our hands... we knew it was time.

So we took him to the oncologist again, and stayed with him till the very end. And then we went home and cried the rest of the night. It was the end of one era, but it wasn't going to be the last ending we'd face in July...

posted by Dale Ingram @ 2:34 PM