Do cats have nine lives? Ours has used at least three of them

We have an elderly Siamese cat named Dugan. He’ll be 17 this summer (that’s 84 in human years), but you wouldn’t know just by looking at him. Aside from a mild heart murmur and some kidney function issues, which only your vet can detect, he doesn’t appear to be more than 10 days old, and we hope he has a few more good years to live.

Dugan has had quite an adventurous existence, and we know for a fact that he has lost at least three of the nine lives he was born with, and probably more, we just don’t know about them. He took advantage of the first life when he was about three years old. I always liked making eye contact with Dugan before I left home for work in the morning, just to make sure he was okay. One morning I couldn’t find him anywhere in the house, and after going through all the cabinets and under all the beds, I started calling him. I could hear him answering me, faintly, but I couldn’t determine where he was. He could hear it better in the living room, by the fireplace. I opened the glass doors on the off chance that he had somehow gotten in there, and I heard him louder than ever.

After determining that it was not sitting by the fireplace, or outside the house next to the fireplace, I discovered that it was on the wall by the fireplace. Evidently, during one of his morning adventures, he had found his way to the false ceiling of our unfinished laundry, and traveled along the ducts of our furnace, reaching the end of the path at the far end of the house, and fall between the exterior wall and the interior drywall in the space by the fireplace.

My husband was out of town, so I called the local animal rescue agency to see if they could help him out of the wall. They tried to open the metal grate on the fireplace, but to no avail, and after they left, their meow was noticeably weaker. My father suggested putting tuna near the opening it had crawled through, thinking it would smell it and crawl towards it, but that didn’t work because the space it had fallen into had no way of getting out.

I finally called a neighbor who came over and cut a ten-inch hole in the drywall, just above our fireplace mantel. Using a flashlight and mirror, we confirmed that Dugan was, in fact, trapped under the mantle, next to the bottom of the fireplace. At this point, he had been trapped for at least eight hours and was desperate to get out. But the space he had fallen into had drywall on two sides, metal chimney flashing, and exterior panels on the third side, all facing up, with no place for him to get a good grip on getting in and out. And it was too low for an arm to reach. So we drop a rope, with a rope at the end, hoping to be able to pass it over his shoulders and under his arms. Which, of course, we couldn’t handle, because he was an angry, tired, hungry and thirsty cat, unwilling to cooperate with our plan.

So my neighbor informed me that he had the rope around Dugan’s neck, and the only thing he could think of was to quickly pull him out of the hole by the neck and remove the rope as soon as it came out, before it came out. drowned to death. I went along with the plan, because it seemed to be the only way, so he tightened the knot around Dugan’s neck a little more and then, on the count of three, lifted him as gently as possible off the wall.

Our plan was to get him out and remove the rope quickly; however, we were unprepared for the whirling dervish with growling teeth and claws protruding from the hole in the wall. Dugan was so terrified and angry that he came out with all guns firing, and my neighbor dropped him before either of us was hurt. Dugan came up the stairs, the rope tight around his neck, and I was afraid he might drown before I could find him. So I did the first thing that came to mind and stepped on the end of the rope, which stopped him in his tracks. Then I quickly ran to him, took the rope from him, and watched him run back to the laundry room, where he seemed to intend to climb back up onto the false ceiling. Fortunately, I was able to thwart his plans for another trip within our walls …

About a year later he had another affair, this one away from home, but it cost him another life. Evidently Dugan liked to get on a different neighbor’s boat and sleep during the day. They had a cover on the boat, and he would climb inside and doze in the cool shade of the boat. The only reason we know this is because one day our neighbors came up with Dugan in their arms and asked us if we had missed him. To be honest, we hadn’t, because he was leaving often during the day, but we thanked them for taking him home and then we asked them what happened.

It appears that that day they had decided to take their boat to the river, so they hooked the trailer to their truck and drove the five miles to the embarkation point. Mom, dad, two girls, and the dog then set off for a nice boat ride on the river, with a picnic lunch and some water skiing mixed in with their fun day together. At some point in his journey down the river, Dugan emerged from a small space next to the engine. Their dog went crazy, Dugan went crazy, so the girls grabbed Dugan and wrapped him in a towel and tried to keep him calm, while the father worked on taming the angry 80-pound Labrador. Suffice it to say that their beautiful day on the river was over and they returned to shore, loaded the boat, drove home and presented us with our cat.

I say they lost one of their lives that day because if someone else had found a cat in their boat while enjoying a beautiful spring day on the river, they probably would have thrown it overboard and continued to have fun. Then, when asked later if they had seen Dugan, they said no, they hadn’t, and offered to keep an eye on him. Hell, I’m a cat lover, and I might have been tempted to do the same. But no, these wonderful people rescued our cat from the river and his angry dog, finished their boat trip early, came home, and gave us our cat, laughing happily as they told their story.

The third life he lost wasn’t all that exciting – our 7-pound, neutered, clawless cat decided to take on a neighborhood cat at least twice his size, and though he made a valiant effort, he lost and ended up at the vet with a infection and 30 points. It was at this point that we closed the laundry room and turned him into a permanent indoor cat, much to his chagrin.

A few months ago we thought we might be close to losing it. He didn’t eat or drink as much and seemed more lethargic than usual. (Yes, I know that lethargy is difficult to diagnose in a cat, since most sleep 23 hours a day anyway. But in this case, it seemed even more than usual.) We took him to the vet, where they did a complete blood test. panel – and determined that perhaps he was beginning to lose some of his kidney function, which is normal for a cat his age. They suggested swapping out his food for something restricted in protein and phosphorus, and a drinking plate shaped like a perpetual fountain, and now he’s a new cat.

Ready to use the rest of those lives for years to come, I’m sure!