This post is dated 11/4/12. I remember being really proud of the title for it. Kitty was pretty sick when I wrote this but was still acting relatively healthy. As many of you know, he died the following spring. I miss my weird handsome kitty.

 

Okay, I took a little tiny bit of creative license with the title of my post. My cat, Ollie, is actually male and he is neutered, not spayed. “Neutered” just doesn’t have the right sound. Fortunately, I am not planning to apply to veterinary school any time soon. Or any time for that matter. I’ve had enough advanced education in my life. I absolutely love my job. It’s a good thing I didn’t fully know what I was getting into with graduate school because if I’d known, I probably would have skipped getting a Ph.D.

But back to another infertile member of the family, Oliie the cat. Ollie has been seeking a LOT of attention from me lately. He climbs up on me to purr and sleep, several times a morning, and what I mean by the morning is any time followed by the letters “am.” Ollie is exacerbating my sleep problems by waking me up a lot. He is also warm, which compounds my hot flashes.

Since Ollie has treated John as his favorite for years, I have been perplexed by this change in his habits. At first, I thought it was because he is getting older and has a number of ailments. I thought that maybe he is just needing more attention from every body. This is true, to a certain extent as he has been asking for more attention from John as well. John thinks Ollie is actually feeling better from his liver medicine (he has a liver disease, pancreatitis, and hyperthyroidism) so he has been seeking more attention. The hyperthyroidism also makes him hungrier so he is bugging us for food more frequently. (And yes, there is a treatment for hyperthyroidism but we tried the cheap route, twice daily medication, and he was unable to tolerate it. The alternative treatment costs $1000. We just paid $1500 in diagnostic tests to find out about all of these ailments so we need a couple of weeks to recover.)

I have another hypothesis as to why I have become Ollie’s favorite. You know how cats love to be warm? How they lie in the sun in the summer and on the heater vents in the winter? I think the cat is seeking me out because of my hot flashes!

I do love my kitty but perhaps I will start sleeping with an ice pack on my chest to discourage him.

Another time I tried to turn Ollie into a girl. I put a tiara on him to try to submit a photo to the site, “Cute Overload.” Then I never sent it in because I was embarrassed about trying to take a funny cat picture.