I found Pinky sitting in a ditch on my way home from work in 1998. She was by the road that leads to the Humane Society, so I suspect someone dumped her there. I took her home and quarantined her from my other cats until I could take her to the vet because she had her head tilted in an “exorcist kitty” pose—I thought something was wrong with her neck! I called the vet, and we took her over for an examination. Fortunately, nothing was wrong with her besides being scared and curious! Pinky was a very quiet, shy, skittish cat who wouldn’t hurt a flea. She always minded her own business and never bothered anyone.
She was named Pinky because she had big pink ears and a pink nose. I also liked to tell her that she had big rabbit feet. She would bound down the stairs, jumping from step to step with her front paws and then her back paws, just like a rabbit. She had a barrel chest, but very small legs with big paws and a big head with a little bump on her nose.
One of my favorite memories of Pinky is how she would dig with both of her front feet into the blanket on my bed—I would imitate her, digging with my hands, and I’d say “dig, Pinky, dig!” When she was through digging, she’d collapse on her side, purring and enjoying being petted.
Pinky had never been seriously ill until the fall of 2009, when I started noticing that she was losing a lot of weight. I took her to Animal Care Clinic on 1/13/10, where Dr. Liz Ortis felt something that did not show up on the x-ray. She was concerned enough to tell us to take Pinky to the VCA in Aurora, where an ultrasound revealed a mass in her small intestine and she was diagnosed with lymphoma. I decided to try the first course of chemotherapy recommended by the oncologist there, but unfortunately Pinky did not respond well to the drug and became very nauseous and stopped eating. After feeding her by hand for a couple of weeks, I was advised to have an e-tube placed in her escophagus, which actually worked quite well until one day during a feeding she jumped off the sofa and started running around the house and the tube came out. It was replaced on the other side of her neck, and again she did well with it.
After trying several different chemo drugs, it finally seemed like Pinky was on the upswing. She’d had a blood transfusion, her numbers were much improved, and she was starting to gain some weight. Even better, the mass was starting to shrink. Then on 3/23/10, she became quite nauseous, and was very withdrawn. I took her to the Animal Emergency Clinic twice that day—the second time leaving her overnight for observation. I will never forget receiving a call about 5:00 a.m., saying that I should come over. When I arrived, they told me that she had been nauseous, had stopped breathing during the night, had been put on oxygen, and seemed to have suffered a blood clot. I knew that she was not going to recover from this trauma, and my mom and I sat with her for a couple of hours, petting her and talking softly to her so that she knew I was there and that everything was going to be all right. Finally, I had her put to sleep. It was very sad and shocking, too, because she had been doing so much better until just the day before.
Things are much quieter around the house these days because we now have two cats instead of four. My other sweet little girl, Mido is also memorialized on this website. I don’t know why my two female cats were diagnosed with two different kinds of cancer and died within just a few months after being diagnosed with the disease—the vets were just as shocked and saddened as we were. I am happy, however, that I have such fond memories of both of them—they’ll always be in my heart. I was told that this picture of Pinky really shows her personality, and I agree.
