this was a weird one. please say a little prayer or ring a bell or chant the Shingyo or whatever you do when a being departs... Willow, my half-tailed tortoise-shell cat,cat was only 3 or 4 years old,and we had her almost a year. she was healthy and happy, except for being allergic to many kinds of food,manifested as chronic loose bowels, her only symptom. she had good weight and a beautiful coat. I had her and my other cat on a fancy low-allergen dry cat food that you can only get through the vet. switched to the venison formula just a day or two ago, because they were out of the rabbit one at the vet's and the duck one didn't work as to preventing the runny stuff.


so Lia,mythirteen year old daughter, had fallen asleep on my bed and I was reading. Willow and my other cat, Muffin,were sitting on the bed with me.she;d been running around getting into usual cat trouble, like chasing the other cat and knocking things over and spilling Lia's juice. around 11:40 or so,I heard a strange sort of squeaky, baking noise, twice. I looked up and Willow was lying next to the litter box,kind of limp.I thought she was still breathing but wasn't sure. I called the vet (there's one she's seen about a mile or so away with 24 hour emergency service) and bundled her into the car (unfortunately I was parked a few blocks away) pretty sure she was gone by the time I got there...walked in doors at the vet around midnight, and no heartbeat.

the vet on call was busy with other animals,but the tech took a look in Willow's mouth and said it looked like my hypothesis, an anaphylactoid allergic reaction that closed off her breathing, made sense...her throat was blocked so you couldn't see the trachea. I talked with this young vet tech for a bit and held my cat to say goodbye, and left her off to be cremated.

I don't know what else she could have gotten into...no toxic plants in the house, nothing different than the stuff she's usually around...I'll see if the veterinary doctor has time to have an opinion on it but it looks like the allergies just went nuts so fast she didn't know what hit her. maybe an epinephrine shot would have saved her but I don't usually keep epi-pens around. and i had no idea anything like this was about to hapen, and i suspect neither did she.

whew...wheel of karma takes some interesting turns. my grandma used to say she wasn't coming back as a person, she was going to come back as my cat because they had it good...don't think this was the one if such a thing is really literally true, but who knows?