Lle Llywela

Nine years! Nine years it took to persuade him that wet food is edible! New year's day four years ago I took too long putting his biscuits down, so he reached over and nicked a mouthful of Poppy's wet food for the very first time in his life, and has been taking wet food quite happily ever since. I wonder now if that impatience, that hunger, was in fact the first sign of this illness, if only we'd known it, because it grew steadily ever after. Cats are so hard to diagnose. Even at the last, it took two scans on Friday before they finally pinned down his diagnosis (I am thankful for his insurance! It was an expensive final day). I'm starting now to realise how much of my daily habit has been structured around Alfie and his quirks, far more so than Poppy. Never leaving the butter uncovered, even if called away in the middle of making a sandwich, that's been a big one - he would quite happily chow down, given half a chance! He would follow me around the house constantly, in case I was about to do something involving food. He shouted at me the whole time I was cooking anything. He stuck his head into anything I put in the sink, in case it tasted good. He was a very fluffy cat, but always felt the cold quite badly, so at the first sign of winter he would start burrowing under my duvet to spend the day there. He spent the last two weeks of his life pretty much living on a dining chair alongside a radiator, so I put a folded blanket there to make him more comfortable. After I let Poppy see his body when we brought him home, she searched the house for him and then went and sat in that spot, confused, trying to figure out where he'd gone. They've always been so close.

We buried him in the centre of the lawn and planted above him a little apple tree that my niece raised from seed the summer before last, so is now just about the perfect size to be planted out. Layla is so distraught, out of my two cats, he was the one she had adopted as her own, because he was so friendly, whereas Poppy really doesn't like children. They've spent hours together, sitting in the kitchen window watching birds. So the tree will be a nice little memorial as it grows.

Thank you - you are right, it really is too easy to look back and see all the signs that seem so obvious now, and think 'if only I'd done more, if only I'd pushed more', but cats are just so hard to diagnose. I did raise his dodgy digestion every chance I got, but the symptoms were too vague and the test results always inconclusive, the advice was always 'treat him for worms and keep monitoring'. Even at the last, it took a second scan before they were able to offer a definitive diagnosis. Before that, they agreed that he was deathly ill (his red blood count was dangerously low when he was admitted and then continued to fall throughout the day) but still couldn't tell me the cause. So while it saddens me to think that he was ill for so long without getting proper treatment, I know that nothing more could have been done, it just wasn't possible to diagnose until it was far too late.

And Poppy will benefit from all the special foods I bought to try and tempt him when his appetite started to fail.

You have a good memory, Ros! I did post pictures right after Alfie and his brothers were born. August 2009. My parents hadn't long moved into their new house when a stray cat fetched up on their doorstep and decided to move in. They took her to the vet to scan for a chip and he said he was 90% sure she'd been spayed - instead, it turned out she was pregnant. When she went into labour at about 9pm one night, my mum phoned for me to come over as she is squeamish around birth. Most cats like to give birth in private, but not Chloe. She was scared and she wanted her people to comfort her! So I sat up all night and played midwife. Alfie was the second born, but he got stuck for quite some time before she managed to deliver him, so I had to give him a good rub to get him breathing and his very first act in life was vomiting amniotic fluid.

I'm sorry about your cats, too. They become such a big part of our lives, don't they? Just now, I'm still adjusting to no longer having my little feline alarm clock to wake me up in the mornings - and I keep forgetting to feed Poppy because she is more polite than Alfie and just waits for me to notice the time, whereas he would always start yelling the moment he felt peckish!