Purple Sock Spot: kitty girl

Last night, talking to G's parents on the phone, the question of what my cats' names were came up. They are apparently avid readers of my blog (I have blog readers!), and the question of whether or not we were still alive (yes) and had good things to eat (yes) came up as there hadn't been any pictures posted for a while. So I thought I'd do a little post about the cats (since I've been thinking about doing a cat post for a while anyway, as it should be fairly easy, and avoids my having to actually come up with something semi-interesting to write about).

In 2004, not long before I got into vet school, I was working at a large veterinary hospital in Sacramento as a veterinary assistant. The hospital frequently received orphaned kittens as patients - mostly sick orphaned kittens who had no people to take care of them. We'd nurse them, medicate them, and (if a staff member did not take them home first), sent them on to the local animal shelter.

In early July, an extremely cute, approximately 4 week old little one with an upper respiratory infection was brought in. Best as I remember the story, the client had found a litter under her porch, and this was the only one of the bunch she was able to catch (possibly this meant that this was the sickest of the lot). She knew there was something wrong with the kittens, and wanted to make them better. However, while she was willing to bring the kitten in (and pay the exam fee), she was unwilling to pay for medications or to perform the treatments (oral antibiotics and some eye ointment - not terribly difficult or expensive). She wanted to euthanize the kitten. The vet wouldn't let her, and had her sign the kitten over to us.

The staff dubbed her "Hermione" (main female character in the Harry Potter series, for anybody who has been unaware of the (to me, unexplained) phenomenon of Harry Potter), fed her a/d (a canned food that is apparently really tasty and is designed to get sick critters to take in some calories) and kitten milk replacer. Within a few days, she was doing better (still needed meds, of course, but at least her eyes were no longer glued shut). Oh, and she had terrible fleas and the worst case of ear mites anybody had ever seen (also not too difficult to take care of).

I went home and told my roommate about how cute this kitten was. She was small, adorable, helpless, quiet, sweet. I had been thinking about getting a kitten for some time, but was not planning on it happening yet. My roommate told me that I should get the kitten. I would be moving soon to live with someone else, and she already had a cat - I didn't think my new roommate would let me have a cat too. My current roommate told me to go ask - so I did - and she said yes. A couple days later, I brought this home.

I had decided that I did not want a cat named Hermione. Among other things, I don't think it's a terribly attractive name. However, I'm horrible at coming up with names - it usually takes me days to come up with a suitable name for pretty much anything. One of my co-workers suggested a music-related name - after all, I do like classical music. After much scouring the internet for names of composers, I settled on the name of Camille (after Camille Saint-Saëns, famous for writing The Carnival of Animals - back when he was alive, Camille was more of a boy's name than a girl's).

In preparation for the kitten, I acquired several cans of a/d and milk replacer, set up the bathroom with her litter box and food and water and some toys, and Camille promptly decided that she didn't want a/d or kitten milk replacer - she pretty much went straight for the crunchy food (I ended up returning all the unopened cans). She also fairly rapidly developed an aversion to her meds (however, as a now-experienced veterinary assistant, I was able to adminster them all to what was still a very small creature, though to this day, oral liquid medications are a trial; pills work much better for this cat). She became active and crazy and silly and all those things a kitten should be. She had trouble meowing though. Her mouth would open, and no sound would come out. She eventually developed quite a vocabulary of chirrups and squeaks, and while she can meow now, she doesn't do it much.

She grew into a gorgeous teenager cat...

And then a beautiful grown up cat...

She's lived through several moves (approximately one move every 1-2 years) including this one to France, and taken it all in stride. She fetches when the mood strikes her, is capable of the most incredible backflips when properly enticed, enjoys being near people (though it's not terribly common that she actually sits on us - she'd rather be somewhere in the room), doesn't make a lot of noise (especially compared to the others), won't hold still for a proper chin-scratch (she gets you to start, and then starts grooming, making the process a little more difficult for the humans involved). Her colour has darkened considerably over the years. She still goes into poofy-tail-silly mode more days than not. She hasn't got the best kitty social skills and gets beat up on by the other cats. She likes to be up high (which luckily, the others don't as much). She finds the ends of my knitting needles to be interesting. She sometimes snores just a little. She does a super cute half roll onto her back when trying to be extra-cute.