Lucky in a Tuxedo

My Tuxedo cat, Lucky (alias: Luciano Houdini de Tuxedo) began to pull his fur out last week. We took him to the vet and found that he has hyperthyroidism, a rather common malady for middle age cats.. he's around ten years old.

Pulling fur out is one symptom of hyperthyroidism. Another symptom is weight loss, and he has lost five pounds since September.. this is quite a weight loss for a cat who weighed 16 pounds.

What do we do about this? We could remove part of his thyroid gland surgically, subject him to chemotherapy, or treat him with a prescription drug called methimazole. We decided, of course, to do the drug and since it might be impossible to get him to swallow a pill, the vet melted it down into a tuna-flavored liquid. We give it to him twice a day by means of a syringe. I hold him tight and Elaine opens his mouth and squirts the stuff in. He does not like this very much and kicks and scratches with all of his paws. Luckily, at least for now, we had the foresight to have his claws cut down while he was at the vets.

Unfortunately, after we started to get ready to begin the medication program, the vet let us know that he has a mild infection as well. We got an anti-biotic for him in liquid form and now we get to squirt him twice as much. The anti-biotic does not taste as good as the tuna flavored medicine and this adds to his discomfort. However, if all goes well, we may be able to discontinue the anti-biotic when the bottles get empty.

We have now been treating Lucky for two days and thought that we might see some quick results, but when we came home tonight we were greeted by a cat with a bald spot on the side of his stomach. Poor kitty.

My granddaughters Bridget and Kaitlin helped me pick Lucky out at the "pound". (I had recently lost my wife and was very lonely. The girls felt that having a pet would make me feel less lonely, and that became true.) He was the quietest cat in the whole building. While the kittens were running around raising the devil, he sat there like a New York Public Library lion surveying the chaos. At that time, he was a TV star.. his picture was being broadcast on Carroll County Maryland cable TV, during an ad for the Humane Society.

Lucky did not then, and not now, enjoy automobile rides. On the way home from the "pound" he made sure that he threw up all over the place. Once "home" he did not treat me as a friend. My arms and legs were a mass of scratches and bites for some time. However, by being very kind to him, even when I would have really wanted to strangle him, he came to tolerate me, and eventually become my good friend.

I named him Luciano Houdini de Tuxedo because of the following reasons: The sounds that he made at first, while he was being a bit uncooperative, sounded a lot like Luciano Pavarotti, and one night when I relegated him to a downstairs room so that I could sleep undisturbed, I was awakened at 3 am by his crying.. he was in my bedroom! How did he accomplish that when I had carefully closed the door tightly on the room he was in? This remained a mystery for some time until I saw him stretch himself up to the doorknob one day, turn the knob with his paws, and open the door! Hence his middle name of Houdini. His last name was given to him because he is indeed a black cat, with a white cravat and white shoes.

I call him Lucky for short.

A few years ago, he met Elaine's Siamese cat, Buf-fee. Besides a few hisses now and then and an occasional bop on the head when Buf-fee got on his nerves, they got along rather well. When Buf-fee passed away, I do believe he grieved for her.

One year ago, another Siamese cat came to live with us: Su-zee. This was (and still is) a wound-up energetic kitten/cat, probably related to a Meer-Cat.. from the way that she perches on her hind legs to survey the terrain. Su-Zee, at first, terrorized Lucky 25 hours a day. She would lay in wait for him to pass by and then jump on his back. I think he tolerated it because she was a kitten (whose mother had been killed in a barn by a "varmint" and therefore had not learned some basic cat politeness.)

However, after a few months, Lucky felt that it was time to let her know that he was the alpha cat in the household. Instead of letting her chase him and jump on him all the time, he now took the initiative once in a while to let her know who was the boss. She then gave in and they now have a kind of truce. Sometimes she jumps and teases him, and sometimes its the other way around.

Anyway, we want to make sure that Lucky recovers quickly because he is a vital member of our family and we love him.