This is Albert... When I bought my home Dec 1994, he was hanging around in the yard. He didn't quite look like this though, he had had a tough life. I already had two cats and didn't really want another, but he didn't go away. I decided to try and make friends with him, he was very skittish. I finally got to a point where I could open the back slider just enough to stick my hand out and he would come and rum his head on it. At the time I was engaged and my fiancee and other family members of his had just done a cat clean up at his grandmothers house who was beginning to show signs of senility and had turned her home over to some 20 plus cats. Needless to say he wasn't too keen on me bringing in another cat. One morning, a few months after we were married, my husband came downstairs, looked out the back slider and found this cat curled up on the patio with frost on his fur. That was it... the cat came in. He was beat up, had ear mites and smelled bad. We took him to the vet, had him bathed, fixed and wounds tended... he came home groggy with a Mohawk from where the vet had to shave his head to attend to his wounds.
Albert took quickly to being a house cat and took on the responsibility of watching over the two female cats and keeping other cats out of the yard. He grew to be a fat 15 pounds. But with all the doctoring we had done on him, his eyes seemed to always be weepy. The vet said he had a condition that is rare for cats but common in dogs where his bottom lashes grow backwards and scratched the eye.
He did a laser surgery with no success, so Albert had an old fashioned eye nip... poor kitty, he looked so pathetic....
Last fall we noticed Albert had a lump on his side. I took him to the vet who took xrays and told me Albert had suffered some serious trauma some time in his life and every rib in his body had been fractured. He suspected the lump was somehow related and that it didn't seem to bother Albert so we shouldn't be concerned. In the next few weeks Albert's lump continued to grow and he began to loose weight. I took him back to the vet who took more xrays and this time said the lump appeared to be a tumor but because of it;s size and location he was referring us to a specialist in another town... I wont go into that nightmare... lets just say 6 hours and $$$$$$ later we're told even with chemo and radical surgery... he MIGHT have another 2 years...
So we started our new year trying to keep Albert comfortable. Sadly on Friday we felt it was in his best interest to send him off to his eternal slumber. That was such a difficult decision. One I have never had to make before and hope I never have to again. The house just isn't the same without Albert... Even "his girls" are pacing the house looking for him...
Albert - we'll miss him
