Sunday, May 03, 2009

Passed on to the relief of birds

'Tis with not a little sadness that I have to report the death of my cat Phoebus Apollo at the age of about 12ish (one can never quite remember with cats as they don't make quite such a fuss when you forget their birthday). After surviving the bout of cancer a couple of years back, he recently decided to start growing his heart to enormous proportions until after an X-Ray a little after christmas it was revealed to be virtually filling his ribcage forcing the lungs down into his belly and not giving them much room to inflate. The problem was that his heart wasn't running efficiently and hence it was pumping too hard and therefore the heart muscles were being built up too much. As it got bigger and bigger the valves widened and fluid started building up in his lungs too. By last week the fluid build up was making him look 9 months pregnant!
Still apart from a few obvious low points where he found eating anything cheaper than £1 per 50 grams totally impossible, he's been fairly comfortable for the 4 months and given that he'd just stuffed breakfast down as heartily as ever only an hour before we found him coiled up in his bed sans the mortal one, I can only assume it was a fairly quick heart failure in the end.
I've said before, he was a crap cat, but it's still a tad sad each time I walk past where his bed was and there's no head rising up to see if there's any food to be had from me. Just a big cardboard box there now, and his lordship himself buried out in the back garden.
Not everyone is sad at his passing though as we did observe some of the blackbirds out there jumping up and down on the fresh mound of earth. I fancy I can hear a faint cry of "Halelujah" from them!