Gráinne Ní Mháille, Playing Soccer in Heaven

It was about fourteen years ago in late summer when a small visitor appeared on our balcony. We live in an apartment complex. The neighbors above had somehow dropped a heel of bread down through the cracks between the floorboards of their balcony, and it landed on our balcony. We did not go out on our balcony much, so I let that heel of bread sit there. I figured birds or squirrels would make off with it.

A few days later, my wife looked out on the world and asked, "Is that a kitten?"

I looked out and confirmed that it was, indeed, a kitten. And the tiny carnivore was gnawing on the crust of bread.

After searching the fridge for something a kitten might eat, we found string cheese. I cut one string into little bits and carefully went out and gave it to the kitten.

This became common in the upcoming days. Sometimes we would have meat the kitten might eat. We would cut up leftover chicken or other meats, so long as it was cooked in a safe way for a cat.

The kitten would announce herself with a bush quake. She would climb up through the inside of the bush next to the balcony to reach me there. I am highly allergic to cats, thus I did not want the cat as a pet, but we would feed her on the balcony.

Although I am allergic to cats, I do love the critters. A cat is royal, at the least, and needs a royal name. Through a series of associations, I decided to name this kitten after an Irish pirate queen who lived at the same time as Good Queen Bess. Gráinne Ní Mháille was better known in English as Grace O'Malley. I named the kitten after her. Thus her common name was Miss O'Malley. (My wife has her own naming conventions, and called this cat Goober or Goobey. No respect for the regal dignity of cats in that woman.)

The next stage of infiltration was when we noticed that if we put food out on the balcony for Miss O'Malley, another larger cat would come, chase her away, and steal the food. This other cat was a huge orange Maine Coon cat. (I named this cat Big George.) My wife informed me we would bring Miss O'Malley inside the apartment to feed her and play with her. I suffered through this daily, but I did get some kitten playtime out of it, despite the allergies. One toy she loved was ping pong balls. It was like watching the world's most athletic soccer player when she would play with one. I bought some larger ping pong balls for her as she grew.

Winter was coming on, and my wife was hinting we should bring the cat inside permanently. After all, the cat was cuter than I am. What are my allergies compared to a kitten's cuteness? Instead, I bought a cat shelter we could put out on the balcony. Miss O'Malley lived in there for the winter.

But come spring, nature took its course. We were still not considering ourselves the primary caretakers of this little tortie girl. She simply happened to live on our balcony and come in for meals and playtime at night. We had never tried to capture her or keep her inside or take her to the vet. Pretty soon, she was growing larger in another way. This once more prompted my wife to suggest that we bring the cat in full-time to live in the apartment.

We got a litter box, litter, and other accouterments of cat servanthood and the cat came inside, despite my allergies. We were now owned by a cat.

My wife and I had never been around a gravid cat before and did not know what to look for. We read up on it, we provided her a box with lots of towels. When it was time, she wanted outside, but we put her in the box in a darkened room. She had six kittens there. She was a bit young to be having kittens, and she had no milk for them. It took us a little while to realize this. By that time, one of the six had passed away. My wife called her niece who had studied to be a veterinary tech. Eventually, she drove in from Ann Arbor. By then, my wife had gotten to a pet store for kitten milk. But that was all for naught. All six tiny kittens died that night.

Still, it left Miss O'Malley in charge of our home. She stayed inside. Eventually she had her first vet visit. She had her shots and was spayed. Perhaps a word should be given here about tortoiseshell cats, commonly called torties. As far as I am concerned, this is the most beautiful coat pattern in cats. Especially in good sunlight where the orange comes out better, these cats can be stunning. But, they can also be a little intense. Some say they have strong personalities (felinalities?). Others use other words, such as spicy or vicious or "Why didn't you name that cat Shredder?" This is generally called Tortitude. When I entered the examination room at the vet's office and let her out of her carrier, she proceeded to parkour off all four walls of the room and wound up on a window sill for the room that was at least four feet off the ground. I left her there until the vet came in. In that first examination, she bit the vet when he attempted to see her teeth. Likewise, she would be quite firm with what my wife was allowed to do with her. On the other hand, I could pick her up or cuddle her or do anything. She decided she liked me early on. (Yes, the gent with allergies, of course.)

I work from home. Miss O'Malley liked attention. I would be trying to work, and would suddenly hear, "Mrrrrrr!" And then I would be paying attention to a cat rather than getting work done. As a writer, I need both hands for the keyboard. Otherwise, seteces ce t e ths. I can't spend the day with one hand petting a cat. I tried various things, such as a folding screen to cut off my work area. But, it was six feet high, and some cats can jump as high as eight feet. It provided no barrier, and when she was separated from me, such as by a door, she would get even more noisy and troublesome. She tried digging a tunnel into the carpet under one door, for instance.

It was obvious that I needed a new idea to keep her busy and distracted during the day. This led to the idea that she needed a friend to play with. When I was young, my eldest brother had a black cat. That cat was cool and friendly. Of course, he was a male cat, and I did not think I wanted to mix males and females. However, my wife works on a large campus with extensive gardens and wild wooded areas. Occasionally, they have feral cats there who drop a litter of kittens. Some of the facilities people would capture the feral cats and have them neutered or spayed before releasing them back onto the grounds. As for the kittens, they would capture them, give vet care, and rehome them. One of a litter that dropped when Miss O'Malley was around two years old was an ebony female. There are three basic body types for common house cats: cobby, oriental, and Maine coon/Norwegian forest cats in the category of, "Are you sure that's not a lynx?" The cobby is the common Western-style cat, such as American shorthairs like Miss O'Malley. The oriental body type is more tubular and is common in Siamese cats. An ebony is an all or nearly all-black cat of the oriental body type. An ebony might have one Siamese parent, for instance. The other parent does not have the recessive point gene. This particular ebony kitten seemed to have another common feature of Siamese cats: she's a loudmouth. But that knowledge was yet to be known.

The woman who cared for the kittens until they were old enough to be rehomed did refer to the little black one as having been the hardest to catch and as the ringleader of her siblings. But, I preferred a black cat, and it was October. Black cats can be much harder to find homes for due to superstitions. This is all a long way to say that we got Miss O'Malley a new playmate. I named the new kitten Morgan le Fey, or Morgana for short. (My wife named her Squeaky for very good reasons.)

Miss O'Malley was not amused.

Now, instead of having Miss O'Malley having a playmate, I had two cats demanding my attention as they ignored each other. Well, that backfired for me.

Eventually, they called a truce, although they did not play together. Miss O'Malley was more likely to hiss and swat at Morgana. Still, there were quiet moments.

But Miss O. always preferred to hook over my leg if she could.

Miss O'Malley decided to be an advice columnist here on Ricochet for a couple of turns.

A couple of years ago, Miss O. started to have health issues. It was during the CoViD scare. Her vet was an elderly man with immune issues, and wearing masks in his office was not optional. He was also on a path to retirement. He was down to working maybe fifteen to twenty hours per week. He diagnosed that she was very constipated and needed an enema, but could not do it himself that day. His office manager helped me find another vet. Now, the old vet's office was at least ten miles away. I had gone to him on the recommendation of my minister, who had taken her cat to him. But we found a new vet who could deal with Miss O'Malley that afternoon and whose office was less than half a mile from my home. We got through that crisis.

The two vets at the new clinic are both female. I have mostly dealt with one, Dr. B. I think it was at Miss O'Malley's next yearly check-up (and annual shots) in August where she said, "Let me check her teeth."

"I wouldn't do that were I you," I warned.

"Oh, it will be fine. Ouch!" she said. Miss O'Malley was two for two on biting her vets.

We had a few more health crises over the last few years that Miss O'Malley got through. She also probably fell and hurt herself at some point. Her back legs were not as responsive as they should have been. She strutted more like a rooster than walked like a cat. The vet tried a few things, but did not identify the root cause of the problem. Coming back to the whole tortitude problem, Miss O'Malley was not easy to medicate. If the medication could not be mixed with her food, she was not going to get medication unless the vet gave her a shot. And she had a good nose. She did not like most of the medications she was prescribed. We could get her to eat food with a stool softener and a laxative, but a steroid or anything else? Forget about it.

The last of the constipation crises came in December of last year. At that point, they suggested upping the dosage of one of her medications, the laxative. They also prescribed another medication that was supposed to help push everything through her system. She did not like this last medication, even though it was compounded with one of her favorite food flavors. Still, with the higher dosage of laxative, things were flowing. Maybe a bit too much. For the next few months, she would have one bowel movement per week. It was huge and loose and very smelly. Then she started having incontinence issues. Then she started urinating in inappropriate places. She also lost a lot of weight, but had a distended belly.

I took her back to the vet last Friday. One of the cats had vomited after the last few meals, but not seeing it happen, I was not certain which one at that point. The vet checked various things and suggested backing off on the stool softener. She also noted Miss O. had lost a pound in the last few months since she had been in the office in late December. Miss O. had at one time been over fifteen pounds. Now she was at nine. The vet also made several tests, took x-rays, and she found Miss O's belly was full of fluid that was outside of any organ. She extracted the fluid and sent off a culture. She also gave us another medication to try, which was an oral antibiotic.

Over the weekend, I found that Miss O'Malley had been the cat who was vomiting. She vomited after every meal until she stopped eating altogether. Then she kept vomiting anyway.

On Monday, we had the results back. Miss O. had a UTI. They had no idea what was causing the fluid, but it did not culture, so was not bacterial. On the x-rays, the vet had not seen it, but the professional radiologist saw fluid in the lungs, too. The vet noticed she was producing drool and bubbling from the nose, too, which is a rather bad sign in cats. The vet gave her shots for the UTI, another to help get rid of fluid, and a third to combat nausea, plus sent me home with an ointment to put on the ear once per day that was supposed to stimulate appetite. The vet also tried one more test.

Yesterday, I called in for the results of the test, which might have explained the fluid build-up in her lungs. That test was negative. We had no idea what was causing the problems. Miss O. still was not eating. She was still drooling and bubbling. I scheduled her last appointment for today.

I took Miss O'Malley to the vet today. I brought her carrier back home empty. I have no idea whether Morgana has noticed or cares. My wife just got home. She noticed that only Morgana's plate was down after the 5:00 PM feeding. She had hoped to see both plates. There is a hole in our lives that used to be filled by a spicy curmudgeon of a tortie, and I shall miss her gravely.