This morning, when I came downstairs to feed our kitties and make breakfast, it was immediately obvious that Miss Gini was feeling seriously poorly.  She takes medication for her stomach, an inflammatory bowel problem, and for asthma.  There are times when she has trouble breathing, but those bouts are fairly short.  We’ve never seen her like this and I called to Kathy to come down and take a look.

We decided we needed to take her to the emergency care center.  She was just lying on the kitchen floor breathing through her mouth.

The trip to the center is just about six miles, but it was just around 8:00 AM and the slow spots in traffic stretched out the drive to twenty minutes.

Gini struggled a few times along the way, wriggling perhaps to find a better position to breathe.  When we take Gini to the doctor, Kathy always wraps her in a blanket or towel and just carries her as she does not do well in a pet taxi.  This morning, Kathy struggled to keep Miss Gini under control and, when we were within a few hundred yards of our destination, she went slack.

I dropped Kathy at the door and, when she got into the center she immediately told the receptionist that Miss Gini was not breathing and they called for a nurse.  In the few moments it took me to park the car and come in, Gini was already whisked into the e. r.  Very soon, we saw a doctor who gave us her best assessment.  She was helping Miss Gini to breathe and she had a low heart rate and no blood pressure.  She thinks that perhaps a blister on her lung, a result of her asthma, ruptured and her lung was collapsed.  She had air in her chest but not in her lung.  She noted that with Gini’s age, the prognosis was not good.  Surgery on the lung could be performed but there was no guarantee on whether she would survive the surgery.  At that time, she was working primarily to stabilize her condition and she was concerned that her neurological function may be severely damaged by the lack of oxygen to her brain.

The doctor was called away a couple of times.  She had asked us where we wanted to go with the treatment and it isn’t an easy decision to make under those circumstances.  We were trying to process the information and do what was best for her.  When the doctor came back, she said Gini’s condition had improved a bit.  They were able to get her heart rate up a bit, but a nurse called her out of the room and that didn’t seem like a good sign.

Kathy and I thought we would tell them to work a few hours to stabilize her and make an assessment but, when the doctor returned, she indicated that Miss Gini’s condition had deteriorated again.  She told Kathy that she was in a coma and invited us to come back and see her.  There were four nurses working on Gini, with a tube down her throat, an i.v. in her and assisted breathing.  After a few moments of this, and the doctor’s assessment, Kathy told them to stop and she died immediately.  The doctor checked for a faint heart beat and there was none.

Needless to say, this was a very emotional time.  Kathy had been weeping on the way to the doctor and in the consultation room.  These last moments were very sad and tears welled up in my eyes as well as we said goodbye to our good friend and family member.

Miss Gini’s birthday is August 20th and she is just over 16 years and 5 ½ months.  We think Kathy got her when she was around one year old.  She was a scruffy little thing having spent her first year on the streets.  She has always been tiny even though she has the biggest ears and biggest eyes of any kitty we’ve ever seen.

Kathy thought she was beautiful right from the start and I thought she was scrawny, but she did fill out and was very distinctively pretty with her white underside, white paws and white highlights on her face all against her dark striping.  Gini is a tabby.

Everyone who saw her thought she was pretty and for many years, her good looks were complemented with a pearl necklace Kathy had made her.

Gini was a lap cat and, after Kathy and I married, and it was just the three of us, she would split time between our laps.  When we’d sit on the couch, she would sit on my lap, then move to Kathy’s lap, and often would settle down between the two of us.

Even though she would sit with us, you had to be careful about petting her.  After three strokes, you were risking a nip as she was over stimulated quickly and would strike back.  However, she also gave us “love” bites.  You knew the difference.  When she was being irritable, she would bite quickly and hard then run.  When she gave a love bite, it was gentle and she wouldn’t run, but her teeth were sharp nonetheless.

A long time ago, before we lived in our house, we noticed that Gini had a bad limp.  X-rays revealed that she had a degenerative hip condition that is not uncommon in cats and dogs.  We put her on some treatments and we never really saw it show up again.  She’s remained pretty spry even now, although jumping was a bit more challenging.  She still would jump up onto our bed and I hope I can do that when I get to be her age.

The move to our house was an adventure.  Gini never traveled well and our plan was to have our things moved first with Kathy and Gini staying behind.  I would come back to the apartment and drive them up to the house after the movers had left.

When our apartment was nearly empty, Miss Gini was nowhere to be found.  We and the movers searched everywhere for her but finally had to take the truck and get moving.  On the way, I told Kathy I suspected she might be on the truck and I thought I knew where she might be.  When we got to the home, I asked the movers to bring in the wardrobe boxes and I started looking for one that had a hanging wardrobe in it.  A long time ago, I had found Gini hiding in there once and thought she might have done that again.  To my relief, she sure had done that!  She had hid in the wardrobe, never made a sound when we lifted it out of the closet and into the box, then made the trip in the back of the moving van!  What a relief …

Gini got used to our house pretty quickly and liked the extra room to run.  When she was trying to get away from Kathy, she liked all the alternatives she had over the apartment.

When it was time to give her medicine, we might find her under our bed or under a chaise lounge and Kathy couldn't get her. I wasn't brave enough to try to grab her because, much as I like Miss Gini, I figured she would bite me. Instead, I would just talk to her for a little while and she would invariably just come out on her own. Then, we'd grab her and give her medicine.

Actually, Kathy did that. She did all the hard stuff when it comes to our kitties and she still does. I clean the box and give them their breakfast and she does all the tough jobs like bathing, medicating, nail trimming and ear cleaning.

In those days, Gini would sleep with us at night and she was pretty good about sleeping through the night.  She would settle down on top of the covers but between my legs.  She would also come up and lay on Kathy’s pillow and hair.

It was just the three of us for the first nearly five years of living in the house.  Miss Gini is really well behaved and never disturbs anything.  We have had up to three Christmas trees for some holidays and there were never any problems.  She loved to play with the model train around the tree and would watch it go round and round, but then she would knock the cars off the tracks.  We loved to play with the train.

She was also playful with dice, ping-pong balls, of course, and her suede mouse that she would often carry and bring to us as a present.

Miss Gini was territorial as we would find out when she once discovered the neighbor’s cat on our back porch.  Her ears pinned back and she attacked the sliding glass door with a fury I had never seen.

We had often thought we might get a second cat once we moved to a house but then it didn’t seem like such a great idea.

Around the fall of 1992, we noticed some behavior changes in her.  She was 12 years old but sometimes would play just like a kitten.  We were entertained by her flopping around even by herself in the family room.  We found out that she had an overactive thyroid condition and needed a low grade radiation treatment.  That kept her at a special care facility for a week and we weren’t allowed to have her on our laps for like a week or two after she came home.  That wasn’t easy as she liked to sit on our laps.

She returned to normal and soon, everything in our house would change.  We were meeting friends in late December that same year and, “just for fun,” we went to look at the kittens at the Chicago anti-cruelty society.  Long story short, we came home with Misty, a three-month old gray tabby with antique white accents around her eyes and under her chin.

Remember that Miss Gini is territorial but I guess we hoped she would warm up to Misty.  Misty was willing to make friends but Gini was not.  Misty has been with us for over three years now and there are times when she and Miss Gini can be found napping on our bed not more than a foot from one another.  However, their relationship was never better than an uneasy truce and was at times more confrontational than that.

Miss Gini has been taking asthma medication for a long time by now.  I can’t remember how long it has been.  Her attacks may have been triggered by stress, and having Misty around was definitely a new source of stress.  It got worse the following summer when we brought home three-month old Tarzan.  Although he started out as a trim little active kitten, he’s grown into a big boisterous boy.  We think he would like to be friends with Gini and play with her.  She wants no part of him and lets him know it in no uncertain terms. 

Tarzan and Misty get on very well together, though, and we’re very glad for that.

For a while, all five of us would sleep in our bed which was bizarre because sometimes there would be sleeping and sometimes there would be fighting – by the cats, I mean.

Finally, we decided that if we ever were going to get some sleep we needed to segregate the kitties.  We tried several schemes in the past couple of years but lately, it’s been the three of them downstairs and Kathy and me upstairs.  Sometimes they behave and sometimes they quarrel, but we try to let them work it out.  Miss Gini rules the roost despite being one-half Tarzan’s size and smaller than Misty as well.  She doesn’t have her front claws as the other two do, but she has enough attitude for ten cats and keeps them at bay.

A while ago, we became concerned that Gini was losing weight and found out that she was having problems with her g. i. system so she has been taking medication for that along with her asthma medication.  All medications have their potential downsides, so we’ve been monitoring her condition closely, but we’ve been encouraged by her regaining her weight and fairly stable behavior for her age.

Miss Gini is a lap cat, as we’ve said and so is Tarzan.  He prefers Kathy’s lap while Gini prefers mine.  Misty is a little more comfortable on her own and sometimes stakes out the back of the couch.  There are times when it’s the five of us on the couch and that isn’t always easy when Miss Gini doesn’t trust the other two, but we make it work somehow.

I went to Indiana on SuperBowl Sunday to watch the Steelers game and returned home late Sunday night (1:30 A.M. on Monday).  When I came upstairs, Kathy asked me if Gini had come out to greet me when I came home.  I said she had not and Kathy noted that Miss Gini had not eaten.  Her appetite has changed a lot lately and sometimes it’s a challenge to determine what food she wants to eat from week to week.  Even though she has gained weight, she can seem finicky.  Apparently, she was lethargic last night as well.  We watch her condition all the time and she has been getting regular blood workups that have been good.  It’s hard to know what is going on with their behavior and we try to get her attention as soon as we see something, but sometimes you need to wait and see.

This morning, her fragile little life came to an end.  We thanked her for all the joy and comfort that she has brought to us over the past 15 years and more.

We spent some time with her after death saying our goodbyes and hope that, while the death experience is not easy, she went with little discomfort.  It wasn’t a long, lingering illness and we’re thankful for that.

We’re having Miss Gini cremated and will keep her remains in a small wooden urn with her name on it and one of our favorite photos of her.