Jane the cat

After only a year of living with us, Jane died. She was sick for a long time. Months, really. It turned out that she was FIV+ and possibly had been for ever? Who knows. Estimates about the prevalance of FIV in outdoor and feral cats vary wildly, and there's every chance that she picked it up during the years she basically lived as an outside cat.

In any case, I now have to decide whether or not to get my other cats tested for FIV. On the one hand, it's expensive to get them tested, and at least two of my cats really, really hate going to the vet or being put in their boxes or anything like that. On the other hand, if we have it in the house we need to know. We can't, in good conscience, take any more cats in to live here if we have FIV in the house. FIV in itself is not that contagious if there's no fighting or sexing or open wounds around the place, so the cat most at risk of catching it is Linus, because he goes outside, and that's the only place where fighting might happen.

I don't want to have to stop Linus from going outside. The whinging alone would be too much to bear.

Although I miss Jane, I don't miss how ill she was in recent months, and the constant visits to the vet, the upset of her being ill all the time, and the cleaning up after her. And Blakey does fill that sitting-on-me-even-when-it's-not-really-convenient-to-have-a-cat-sit-on-me niche that Jane used to occupy so well. Blakey has even taken it a stage further and will crawl up the sleeve of the Slanket and attack my armpits while I'm trying to type.

So cute. So inconvenient.

Poor Jane. I'm sorry there wasn't anything we could do, and I'm sorry we didn't know that sooner, or there might have been more chicken and less grumping at you in your end times.