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Abner - Fierce

Originally uploaded by ketoneus

This is a tough blog to write. We lost Abner, our older cat today. We noticed yesterday that he was moping around and not eating and drinking as usual. When I took him to the vet this morning, he could barely move. He had an extremely low temperature and his breathing was labored. The vet did x-rays and initially determined that he had congestive heart failure. He had fluid around his heart and in his lungs. Further tests revealed that he was also diabetic (previously unknown) and that his bloodsugar was 686. Dr. Shook said that he had something called “non-ketonic diabetic syndrome” and basically his systems were starting to shut down. The treatment for the syndrome and the treatment for the heart disease would counteract each other. She had never treated a cat with just the diabetic syndrome and had them survive. He was clearly suffering, so we made the decision to put him down.

Abner came into our lives in early September 1997. We were just beginning our sophomore year at Texas Tech. One of our favorite (cheap) forms of entertainment in college was to go to the pet store at the mall and play with the animals. On this particular night, Lisa picked out a tiny kitten to play with while my roommate and I went to Radio Shack. When I found Lisa holding the kitten in the fish room, I knew I was about to get a new roommate. Abner came back to live with us at the University Plaza private dorm. We got caught with him the next semester and Abner had to live with our friend Shayna for a few months. That summer, Abner came to live with me in McKinney. He and mom quickly became buddies. This is the summer where his habit of drinking from the sink was created and when his chicken baby food addiction was cemented. He loved the attention Mom lavished on him. My roommate didn’t come back to school the next semester, and so we traded him my Toshiba 5-disk CD changer for Abner and the couch. We got a heckuva deal.

Abner had a little brother join him when we returned to school the next year. Lisa had adopted Oliver the semester before, but he had lived with her over the summer. Abner wasn’t thrilled about Ollie’s presence at first, but Ollie absolutely loved his big brother. Abner grudgingly accepted Oliver’s presence and secretly enjoyed having another cat to play with when we were gone.

He was an incredibly lazy, incredibly sweet cat. When he was a kitten, he would fall asleep on his way across the room to the food bowl. He was also known to fall asleep in the litter box when he was a kitten. A perfect day for Abner was to drink water from the bathroom sink when he first woke up, have chicken baby food for a breakfast treat, 7-8 naps throughout the day, a few minutes of playing with Ollie, and then to fall asleep between Lisa and I as we each petted his belly and rubbed his chin.

You’re gonna be missed A.C. (Abner Cat). I’ve never had a better cat, or any pet, for that matter. I hope you’re in a place where the bathroom faucet never gets turned off and the bowl of chicken baby food never runs out. We miss you already.