Our kitties

I can't believe I haven't posted about our cats yet! I certainly have enough pictures of them to share. Mowee is the first cat we got. We went to one of those pet adoption things at a local pet store, and she seemed to take right to us. She was about 6 months old when we got her in April of 2004, and just the cutest thing!

The next year we decided that she needed a buddy, so we got Cheeto. Friends of ours mentioned that at the farm they go to, a cat just had a litter of kittens and that we were more than welcome to have one...so we snatched him up.

Here I must mention the first of Cheeto's medical issues...he has asthma. That's right! He even has his own little kitty inhaler and everything. He's also on prednisone (which is a steroid) and it sort of ties into a few of his other issues that I'll talk about.

Now Cheeto was always sort of a clumsy cat, but we didn't really think anything of it. Well in December of 2006, his walking got really bad. It was almost as if he walked like he was drunk. So there were numerous trips to the vet. He started having some pretty bad digestive issues (which we sort of figured out on our own was from the prednisone that he was on for his asthma), and they really just couldn't figure out what was wrong. So we ended up taking him to a neurologist in June of 2007. After an MRI and a spinal tap (not cheap procedures) we found out that his spinal cord is too short and he will never walk normal. Here's what he looked like after his visit to the neurologist:

...he was not a happy camper.

So we know that he will never walk normal, and that's fine. He gets around fine, for the most part, but for some strange reason, he just won't poop in his litter box. We've tried moving it, changing the litter, all sorts of stuff. We've finally just come to terms with the fact that we'll probably be picking up poop off the floor for the rest of our lives...oh well. But...it becomes a problem when he's on the prednisone and not pooping in the box. Without getting too graphic, lets just say that the prednisone seems to give him some major digestive issues, and it turns into a big mess in our house. So just last week I ordered a new steroid inhaler for us to try...this should give him the help that he needs from an oral steroid, but without all the side effects. Let's keep our fingers crossed that this will finally be the answer!