In between tonight's twin television treats of Twin Peaks & Game Of Thrones, I take a moment to talk about the second-oldest cat, & third-oldest animal in the house, Bolan. I wrote a bit about him five years ago on the blog. He went from being the goofiest & youngest to being a kind of patriarch - Beatrice, the oldest, has no interest in being in charge, & the other two cats seem to naturally submit to his noisy insistence.
Recently, he lost some weight, & the hair on his ears thinned, & we were like, what the fuck? We imagined the worst, & in fact he tested positive for FIV - which is like cat HIV - but that was a dumbass false positive. Fuck false positives. An x-ray showed he had too much hair in his stomach, he couldn't digest or pass or throw it up. That's right: this dumb cat was too busy grooming himself & his siblings, it made him sick & he lost weight because of it. We gave him a gel - which he loves eating - to dissolve the hair in his belly, & he's returned to being a chubby cat - & even the hair on his ears has started to grow back.
As I write this, all four cats are in the same room, but he's the noisiest, the most insistent, & of course the most annoying. He does groom his younger siblings, but the oldest, Beatrice, has never really taken a shine to him. Maybe if we had kept the group to just him & her. But we didn't. & I think I'll talk about that in a future Sunday installment.
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