Poor Little Kitty.....

Don't worry, she didn't die or anything. She did, however, force me to admit I was wrong about something, and that is as close to death as we come around here.

The gray and white kitten is named "Missy," although Hubby calls her "Little Brutus." That would be because the orange one he calls ... you guessed it ... "Big Brutus." That Hubby is creative if nothing else. The orange one is named Olive, but he never gets called that anymore.


Little Brutus is as sweet a kitty as you would ever meet. She is very easy-going, undemanding, and easy to get along with. All she wants is an occasional bite of dry cat food and a warm spot in which to lie. During the summer it's the front porch, as in the photo above.

During the winter, it's underneath the wood stove in the living room. Unless it gets really, REALLY cold, when she climbs up behind it. I'm surprised her fur hasn't caught on fire yet.


She doesn't like to be held much, as you can see in the photo below. She is trying to negotiate her freedom with Hubby, and they are both pretty stubborn.


When she was just a little bitty thing, she swallowed thread. Not just any thread, but quilting thread. She had it looped under her tongue, and she swallowed both ends. We took her to the vet, and he said the first thing he would have to do was x-ray her to make sure there wasn't a needle in there. Good Lord. I hadn't even thought of that. To make a long story short, $450 later she was fine.

Then one night we heard a commotion at the foot of the bed, her flopping around and gasping, and Hubby thought she had swallowed something again. He foolishly stuck his finger in her mouth to get whatever it was out, but he didn't leave it in there long.

Turns out the kitty has epilepsy. Her seizures almost always occur when she's asleep, and since she sleeps on our bed, that means that when she has one, we are jarred from a sound sleep to the sounds and sights of her seizing. It is very disturbing. The vet said the seizures weren't harmful to her, and unless they got worse in severity or longer in duration, we should just ride them out. He said she would not grow out of them, but that they traumatized us more than they did her. After all, how much memory can she hold in that tiny little brain?

We kept her seizures noted on a calendar for a long time, trying to decide if she needed to start on medication. The vet was reluctant to do that, since it meant keeping her on it for life, but if they became worse I was willing to do it.

Then they just stopped. I felt all smug and all, since both her regular vet and another vet I met on a bicycling trip told me she would NOT grow out of them.

It's been at least five years since she had a seizure. But she had one this morning. Unfortunately (and also comically, so sue me), she was asleep at the top of the stairs (underneath a wall heater unit) when the seizure began. We were alerted to the situation by the sight of her flopping all the way down the stairs. Gus ran to see if he could help her, and the other cat looked at her like she had lost her mind.

It was over in a matter of seconds, probably less than a minute and a half. She lay there panting, pupils dilated to the point that there was no color in her eyes. Then she got up, shook herself off, and went straight for the food bowl. Apparently having a seizure is hard work; she is always starving right after she has one.

I hope this is not a sign of things to come. Not only is it scary for all of us, but I just washed the sheets AND bedspread on our bed.