My tiny cat Fifi is so precious, and in my eyes very, very beautiful, despite being born with only half a tail. Back in mid June I could see that Fifi was not doing well. Her proper name is Fiorellina (Little Flower), and she is so precious. As it happened my DIY friend was coming that day, and he has always had cats, and he suggested we took her to a vet he knew and thought highly of. To cut a long story short, it transpired she was in really bad pain, and that the only way of taking her out of pain was an operation – to remove her eye. I still cringe when I write that, but apparently it is not uncommon with older cats. I couldn’t leave her in pain, so I agreed to the op, which they did two days later.
At 17 I thought there was every chance she wouldn’t make it through, but she is a little fighter, and I was overjoyed when they told me that she had. The problem is that her other eye had never really worked properly, so she now sees rather poorly; consequently I was very worried that she would fall off something, especially while still wearing the cone of shame.
In fact, for the first few nights, until I got myself better organized, I slept on the floor with her. As ever the law of sod prevailed, and my DIY mate had gone away for a while, and so I had to set about doing some DIY for myself. She loves sitting on my table with me, so my first effort, terrified that she would fall off, was to build a circular cage right around the table, with a kind of opening for me – it’s where I eat, paint and where I am writing this – and it’s not a very big table. My next effort was to make her ‘bridge’ wider and safer. The bridge goes from the settee area in my small sitting room, over to her eating area and cat flap, and was put in place a year or so back when it was clear that she could no longer jump up to her eating area. Finally, terrified that she might decide to jump or fall out of a window, I made screens for each window, using the same green plastic-coated wire netting that I had used for the table cage. None of this was very easy, and the wire kept cutting me, but eventually the windows were safe. Just as well as all of this was done in the hottest weather, and I really needed to have the windows open from about 3am onwards, once I was sure it was cooler outside than in. Certainly not my best summer ever, but then again, I still have my tiny half-tailed one-eyed little lady – less than two and half kilos, and in my eyes the most beautiful creature ever created!! So perhaps it is my best summer ever!!
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