I lost my black and white tuxedo kitty Mutti ("Moo-tee") yesterday on her 10th birthday. She'd been off her food. My wonderful vet took x-rays, didn't like what she saw, and did an emergency exploratory. When they came for me wayyy too quickly, I knew the news must have been very very bad.
And it was--cancer all over her liver and environs, plus something on top of the cancer that Doc Carol had never seen before--granules of some sort. Trust Mutti to be slightly not-normal--it was the story of her life. I told Doc Carol to take whatever samples/whatever she needed to figure out what was going on--in the hope that might help some other kitties some day. She left us on the table, of course.
We know her birth date since her mother produced her litter in a cardboard box at the local NAPA store where our next door neighbor's oldest daughter worked. Fast forward two years and she was removed from what had turned out to be an abusive home and was back next door. We adopted her and the rest was slightly neurotic history.
She spent her first couple weeks with us under one of two desks--desks which only cleared the floor by no more than 3"! I had no idea a 2 year old cat could fit under there! I felt a little silly in the morning when I would change out her food and water dishes (specially closen to be very squat dishes, of course) and push the new ones under whichever desk she was under that day . . . . but eventually she decided that we were truly a safe place and she came out. To the end of her days she hated loud noises and despised fireworks, she'd nip without warning if something got to be "too much" for her, and woe onto anyone who ever tried to touch her blindingly-white tummy.
She was happiest lying in a patch of sunlight or on my tummy when I'm reading. In winter she'd sleep on top of me at night--when the weather got warmer, it was the end of the bed for her. She had a lovely gravelly purr and felt that no newspaper should be read without a kitty's head protruding toward you under the bottom edge. Enjoy your sunbeams, chase the birdies, and eat to your heart's content, sweetie. Your mama misses you terribly.