Q-Bert

Bert was the third cat to enter our household. (His name is Q-Bert, to be exact-- anyone remember the old video game?) When we got Neffie and Peggy, we were living in a one-bedroom apartment with two rabbits, to boot. A friend of ours who had about eight cats told us about one of them, named Bert, who was at the bottom of the pecking order in her house. He was also afraid of humans and spent his days under her bed. We were thinking of buying a house, and we told her that when we moved in, we would take her Bert. At least, we reasoned, he would only have two cats lording it over him instead of seven.

When Bert arrived, he certainly was a scaredy cat. He hid in our basement most of the time, unless we were sitting very quietly, reading or watching TV (with the volume not too loud, of course.) He was especially afraid of men. The poor cat was starved for attention, but he was too afraid to come and ask for it. He would lie on the floor in a ball, grasping his hind leg with his front paws, and use it to pet himself on the head with. As the years went by, he became more used to us. He even became used to William, although this was harder for him since William is a man. Once, when I went away, Bert was stuck outside for two days because when William would open the door to let him in, Bert would come running up to the open door, see William looming in the doorway, and back away in fright. He has finally accepted William as a non-danger. He still runs when strangers arrive, but he hesitates before running, and may even stay where he is if they're not too alarming.

Another interesting thing about Bert was that he never played. He would occasionally wrestle with Kana, but that was always instigated by her. He would roll around in catnip, but never bat around balls or play with string. We thought that when he was declawed, maybe he tried to play with things and found out that it was painful and didn't do it anymore. (We didn't declaw him-- I wouldn't do such a thing to a cat.) At any rate, we didn't really know why.

A few years ago, Bert almost died. I don't remember why we took him to the vet- he was a little listless, or maybe his nose looked particularly white, or something like that. It turned out that he had a red blood cell parasite, which had made him severely anemic. Things didn't look good. They drew out some unit of blood. Healthy cats are supposed to have a count of about 44 red blood cells in this size unit of blood. Bert had 7. He wasn't eating and he was losing weight. Drastic measures were called for. They wired a tube directly into his stomach and gave him subcutaneous fluids. We took him home and locked him in the bathroom by himself, where he spent most of his time sleeping. Four times a day, we ground up his antibiotics with some water and pushed it down the tube with a syringe. We then loaded canned food into the syringe and fed that all through the tube as well. Once a week he had to go back to get his blood cells counted, and they would give him more subcutaneous fluids. This went on for about two months and the blood count climbed. Finally he began to eat on his own. One day he pulled the tube out, and when we took him to the vet, it took four people to hold down the fraidy-cat so they could take the blood count. The vet walked back into the room and he leapt out of her arms to the floor and turned around on her, hissing and snarling.

She said, "I think he's better."

Since then, Bert has begun to play! He frisks and frolics. He doesn't let the other cats push him around. If he is particularly hungry, he ignores hierarchy and makes Neffie wait until he's done eating. He really is a changed cat.

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