Beech Tree News Network

My cat, Colleen, is probably in the last months of her life.  She is nearly sixteen years old, and this summer I’ve noticed a marked difference in the way she gets around.  It’s harder for her to get up once she has been lying down for a while, and she can barely manage the two steps that lead up to my utility room.  Even in Colleen’s younger days, our daughter, Nikki, referred to her as our grandma cat.  She has always had that “wise beyond her years” demeanor.  I believe it’s because she had to deal with so much at an early age.
    Colleen came from one of Lightening’s litters.  Lightening was a stray cat that showed up at our house and kept having litters of kittens that grew up to be as wild and crazy as she was.  We could never get our hands on Lightening or any of the offspring of her first two litters or we would have had them all spayed or neutered.  When she was pregnant with her third litter, I made it a point to closely watch her comings and goings, so I noticed when she decided to move the kittens from their hiding place under the barn to an old abandoned truck on the farm.
  The first kitten she hid in the old truck was a gray and white female.  I quickly snatched the kitten when she returned to the barn to get another.  I put her into a box with our mother cat, Tango, who had three kittens of her own.  To Tango’s credit, she accepted the little kitten (whom we later named Colleen) as one of her own.  I planned on grabbing a few more kittens, but when Lightening realized that Colleen was missing, she left the other kittens where they were—out of reach.  They were juvenile cats by the time they came out of hiding, and true to form, we could never get our hands on them.
Colleen thrived under Tango’s care.  I was afraid she might have Lightening’s temperament, but I needn’t have worried.  She was a very kind and affectionate cat from the beginning.  She never tried to jockey for position or affection like many cats in multiple cat families sometimes do.  She just stood back and waited her turn.  She’s still like that.  I’ve started standing guard over her while she eats, because my cat, Figaro, tries to push her away from her food bowl, even though he has a food bowl of his own—the cat food is always tastier in the other bowl. 
My husband, Garey, gave Colleen the name, Million Dollar Cat, because of the money we ended up spending on her at the vet’s office.  Early in the fall, when Colleen was about five months old, she climbed up into the engine of Garey’s truck.  She was looking for some heat to ward off the chill of the autumn night.  The next morning, Garey went out to start his truck before work.  He heard her before he could find her.  He came running into the house to tell me that he was headed to the vet’s office with Colleen.
Colleen stayed at the animal hospital for nearly a week.  She had three broken legs and a gash in her side.  When we brought her home, she had casts on all three legs and stitches in her side.  I don’t think any of us thought she would survive.  Our daughters kept watch over her and made sure she was given pain meds and antibiotics per the doctor’s instructions.  Garey would check on her before and after work.  It took about six weeks before she could get around.  I came home from the grocery store one day to find her batting a marble around in the kitchen floor.  I was amazed, not only by the fact that she had survived, but also because she had the heart to play.
One of the odd things about the whole incident is that Colleen preferred Garey over the rest of us.  He is the one she has always wanted to sit next to on the couch, and he is the one she makes a point of greeting when he gets home from work.  It’s as if she has wanted to assuage him of any gilt he might have felt over her injuries. 
Colleen began her life as the daughter of a wild and crazy mother.  She was raised in foster care, and she received life-threatening injuries before she was a year old.  She has seen many cats come and go on this farm and has often put up with their annoying and selfish behavior with a lot of patience and tolerance of her own.  Garey was accurate when he called her the million dollar cat.  She’s worth that and much more.