Religulous & thoughts on the afterlife & Nutter

Nutter is gone. :(
It turns out he never had cancer. He had a cyst in his lung. In September, it burst, flooding his chest with fluid so he couldn't breathe or eat. We had his chest drained and got him an appetitite stimulant, and he ate and seemed really happy and like his old self for a few days, but the fluid started to come back and he stopped eating again. He wouldn't even eat the Nutri-Cal paste that he loved so much. We brought him to the vet again and got the appetite stimulant but it didn't work. He was just lying on the floor crying. It was awful. So the next morning (Saturday 9-27) I sat down with him and told him he was going to see Zen by noon, and that we were taking him at 11:30. At 11:30 I was in the bathroom getting ready and Nutter walked into his carrier and looked at me as if to say "let's go."
He was down to 6 lbs from his top weight of around 11 (never a big or fat cat). He laid peacefully on the table at the vet and didn't flinch or cry out or struggle. I had my hand on him and he was gone between heart beats. He was ready to go but oh how I miss him and the silly things he did. The trick he did for food, the way he would meow at me without making noise (just opening his mouth), the way he would attack people's feet when he was happy to see them, how he liked to jump onto Willy's shoulder and headbutt his face...what a silly, goofy, boy our Fluffernutter the Wondercat was.
I lost my job the same week Nutter was so sick, and my last day was last week. So that's been really hard too. I hate not working, being home alone, having no money. If I had money, I could buy things to fix up the house with, to organize all our stuff, etc. But I'm trapped here, can't even go out to eat. All I can do is write.
I did got to the movies this week, to see Religulous, Bill Maher's documentary on religion. It was enlightening and it made me realize something.
When I think about the afterlife, there is no god there.
I see green fields and stone walls and trees and buildings and people and animals, but there's no god, no angels, no harps. No 72 virgins. No prize, no punishment. Just peace.
I see my dad in the Elsewhere bar, hanging out with everyone who had Alzheimer's and dementia in life, all their memories regained. It's a dark place, crowded, with the music a little too loud, and the door opens way too frequently to let someone new come in. The bartender isn't god, he's just whoever felt like pulling pints at that moment.
NaNoWriMo starts in a week or so. Beside looking for a job, that's my focus. And cleaning the house. Which I hate. So I'll be writing a lot! My NaNo blog is over at LiveJournal (I don't know why).

Happy Birthday Sputz

My skinny little kitten is a big boy now, a whole year old! He weighed 4 pounds when I got him at 4 months old and now he's around 18 lbs (pictures show him at 3 months and 11 months). But he's not fat. He's got a completely different body structure than Nutter. For instance, the space between Nutter's hipbones (how wide his back is) is about 2 of my fingers. Sputz's (and Ursi's) are the width of my hand. They have very wide bodies and their legs are kind of short for their size. They are what you would call "sturdy" in build. My best friend said that if my ragdolls were little boys, they would wear "husky" sized clothes.
Nutter has a bad cold. I know I should take him to the vet, but he'll get that awful pink stuff, and I'll have to catch him twice a day and jam it down his throat. He hates being picked up or held (always has) and forcing medicine into him doesn't make that any better.
When I came home yesterday he had a huge plug of dried mucus in one nostril. He was frantically licking his nose over and over trying to dislodge his, breath wheezing. I had to catch him and pry the chunk out. Did he appreciate that? No. He refused to eat supper. He sat there and yelled at me. I put down the food. He looked at it and yelled for food again. Will got him to eat some when he came home.
Nutter's so very thin. He probably doesn't weigh 8 lbs. But he is in good spirits, very lovable, loves the ragdolls (as you can see in the picture), loves us. He tries to play with the other cats, running around with them, and then he can't breathe, and he gets kind of bug-eyed trying to get air, and I feel terrible because I can't help him. I tell him he's 14 1/2 years old and he's got 1 lung and cancer and he can't run around like a kitten anymore.
I downloaded all the pictures and words from my old pets blog. Yahoo keeps promising a tool that will let us move our blog contents, including comments, in one step, to any blogging platform. I'm waiting. Not that I have many comments that I care about, but it will be a pain to rebuild something like 75 posts.
BTW, the picture of Nutter and Sputz is on the PetPlace website. It is slide 12 under "friendly cats."

Fluffernutter the Wonder Cat

12.19.14.5.10 18 Uo 8 Oc
Most likely, the mass in Nutter's lung is cancer. :(
He will be 14 in August and we've decided against surgery or anything invasive to prolong his life.
Right now he doesn't appear to be in pain, he eats like a piggy, he seems as happy as he's been since he lost Zen last year...if it hadn't been for that weird fever last month I'd never think he had a terminal disease.
Am I sad? Of course. Some afternoons I lay in bed with Nutter purring beside me and sob. I still miss Zen so much. I know Nutter misses him too, and that's played a big part in our decision not to have his lung removed and to aggressively treat the cancer.
Ironically, other than the tumor, he is very healthy for his age.

The picture is one I took a few months ago with my camera phone. It looks good on the tiny screen but on a PC monitor it's very dark with a green tinge. I changed it to bw and cropped it.

Crossposted.

another opportunity

Just a year ago, I received the news about my beloved Zen's thyroid condition, which led to the heart condition that killed him about 100 days later. I wrote this essay, called "Love, Loss and Tolerance" about how I felt about my black Siamese kitty.
Last Thursday, for no real reason, I skipped the ASC meeting. I was up there, one exit away, having dinner, and I decided I was going home.
When I got home, I went through my routine of calling Nutter. It looks like this: I yell "Where's my kitty?" and he comes downstairs and meows at me, gets on me, purrs, the whole thing. When Zen died last year I made a vow to Nutter that every day for the rest of his life I would spend time playing with him and petting him and make sure he purred.
He didn't purr on Thursday, although he did come down the stairs. He looked...wrong...I guess. I asked my husband if he thought Nutter looked sick. Will thought he looked tired. I did some things and eventually went upstairs to bed. By then Nutter was clearly sick. His third eyelids were showing, he was completely lethargic, uninterested in anything including his comb. He wasn't meowing at all (usually he "talks" constantly to us). He was shaking too. He left the bed and went downstairs into his basket. Will, who is usually indifferent to the cat, took the basket and put it on his desk so he could pay attention to Nutter. When he came upstairs to bed, he brought the cat (in the basket) with him. I slept upside down in the bed all night, one hand on Nutter, giving him Reiki and Shamballa & whatever other energies came through, basically waiting for him to die. He looked that bad.
In the morning, his eyelids had retracted and he begged for food. I called the vet anyway, because he was still sick, but not as bad as the night before.
The bottom line is this: Nutter's got a mass in his chest. It's probably cancer although we're obviously hoping it's not. I will know in a couple of weeks for sure. I've got a Shamballa Basic Healer class this weekend that will feature Nutter healing, and of course I've been working on him constantly.
My first instinct, of course, is to do everything for my cat, regardless of the cost. But he's almost 14 and I'm not sure he'd BENEFIT from being cut up and radiated and all that. He's near the end of his natural life. I hate to let my kitty go, though. It's a selfish thing, I know. Keep him here with me, unhappy and in pain, or let him go and find Zen on the other side, his friend he STILL searches for 9 months later?
I'm keeping to my vow of playing and petting and combing and purring, pouring antibiotics into him twice a day and hoping I won't have to decide, that it will be just a bad infection and we'll clear it up just fine.
cross-posted to my Pets blog