Unusual Behavior

It has been long documented on this blog about how much our old cat, Juno, hates me. She refuses to be around me if she has any choice. If I enter a room, she runs out of it as quickly as she can.

I tried to prove the old proverb that a cat loves the one who feeds them the most, but I proved it false. She came to me each day at feeding time and meowed and rubbed against my legs, but if I reached to pet her she skittered away. Then she came back to beg for food again. Once I fed her, she disappeared for good, and didn't return until the next feeding time.

All of that is why this was so weird.

Sunday morning, Juno jumped up onto my bed, then walked up onto my lap and laid down on top of me. She sat there happily as I pet her for probably ten minutes at least. I grabbed my wife's phone, because it was in the bed next to me, and took that picture. Then I took some video. 

I had to have proof that this had even happened.

And of course I promptly dropped the phone. When I scooped it back up, it had switched to the wide angle lens (something that only my wife's phone has, not mine), and I got some more extended video.

Juno is fourteen years old now, and my kids often joke that she has cat Alzheimer's. Sometimes she'll sit in front of her food bowl and beg for food, even though there's still food in the bowl, although she's probably just saying, "I'm not going to eat that slop, it's old. Give me new food." 

Then there's things like this, when she seems to forget how much she hates someone, and sits on their lap purring while the hated individual pets her. Have you gone senile, Juno?

We're afraid it might be something worse, though. This might have been an early indication of a problem, because she has been getting progressively sicker ever since then. Sunday, she puked again and again. We kept finding new places where she'd left a little puddle of bile for us.

Then she took to hiding underneath the big chair in our bedroom. She only comes out to puke again, but she has enough of her mental faculties to go to the last remaining places on the ground floor that have carpet and puke on that. So, she might not be that far gone.

I don't know. She's not eating much, and if she does eat, it comes back up quickly. I'm going to take her to the vet this morning, and see if there's anything that can be done for her.

My wife has been preparing the kids for the possibility that there isn't. We can't afford to spend a ton of money to keep a really old cat around a few more months, not while we're in the middle of all this home renovation stuff. Juno picked a bad time to get sick, I guess.

All I know is that if this is the end, I'm glad Juno chose to come to me Sunday morning and act like a nice cat for me one time before she goes. I'll be able to remember her much more fondly for doing so. If only she'd done this all along, I'd consider myself a cat person by now.