Mortimer in Diary

Dave has two cats, Harriet and Mortimer. I’ve never been a fan of cats but he’s had them for 16 years, so they come with the territory.

The last few weeks, Mortimer has been getting thinner and thinner and now she is just skin and bone, she doesn’t have any muscle on her at all. Her spine and ribs are sticking out and yet she eats and eats and never gets full. I’ve been telling Dave for a while to take her to the vet.
I don’t think she’s got worms, I suspect an under active thyroid because of her age.

The last couple of weeks, she’s started going senile. She’s taken to standing in her water bowl with her front paws and just staring down at the water for ages. Then she paws at the water, splashing it everywhere, before wandering off, leaving wet footprints all over the kitchen.

Plus she wails for food every time we go into the kitchen, tripping us up to run to her food bowl to wait for us to put food in it, even though, half the time, there’s already food in there.

She’s also started going to the toilet on the kitchen floor and on her bed, which is very strange for an animal to do. And she hasn’t groomed herself for weeks, so she’s completely filthy. Dave did give her a bath, but of course she hated it.

Last night Dave rocked up to bed at 3am. I asked what he had been doing until then and he started crying and crying, saying he had been lying on the kitchen floor with Mortimer. He feels really guilty that he’s let her down as he’s been concentrating on Harrison instead. He thinks she’s at death’s door and said he was talking to her, giving her permission to die if she wants to.

I tried to reassure him, saying he’s given her a great life and that it isn’t too late to ring the vet to see if they can do anything to improve her life. I’ve been trying to get him to do this for months, I don’t know why he hasn’t, and now he feels really guilty for it.

Poor Mortimer. The worst thing about having pets is that you always have to say goodbye to them.