Feline Friday – #26 – never a dull moment

August 14, 2015 by RMW 15 Comments

My three cats, Pharoah, Freddie and Frankie are a constant source of amusement. So here are some recent photos of their hijinks.

As soon as I am out of bed in the morning, Freddie (black and white) and Frankie (grey and white) race into the bathroom to see who can jump into the bathtub first. I have to turn on a trickle of water so they can get their early morning drink. Because of the drought in California they only get a couple of minutes of this activity. Also because I don’t drink water straight out of the tap and don’t think they should either.

Pharoah (at top) and Freddie taking advantage of the cool tile floor and the breezes wafting in from the front patio door.

Pharoah posing for his close-up. His funky eye is doing really well lately. Hope I haven’t spoken too soon.

He is a feral cat and if I got within three feet of him he would take off in a nanosecond. At this point he is deciding if I am too close.

Frankie and Freddie are checking out the cat carrier that Frankie took a trip in yesterday when we had a big scare.

In the morning I couldn’t find Frankie anywhere in the house. Usually he sleeps on the bed and gets up when I do. After twenty minutes of searching in every nook and cranny in the house and calling his name he still didn’t make an appearance. Then he came out of nowhere, sniffed at his dish in the kitchen and ran off upstairs.

I located him squeezed into the space between a file cabinet and the day bed in my office. What the heck was he doing there? Usually in the mornings is when he is charging up and down the stairs, careening around the living room chasing his toys, jumping on Freddie and generally being a big nuisance while I am trying to make my coffee.

I managed to turn his head up so he was looking at me. The pupil in his right eye was completely dilated… a big black saucer… while his left eye was just a tiny slit.

I looked up the symptoms on the internet and found the term “anisocoria.” There are various causes but the one thing that kept jumping out at me as I read about it on various sites was the advice to take the cat to the vet immediately. So out came the cat carrier and off we went.

The vet spewed out a bunch of technical terms explaining to me why all the reasons for his anisocoria could not be any of the normal causes. She basically looked at me and said she didn’t know what was wrong. Great. All I knew was that Frankie was not himself. Even at the vet he was trying to stay curled up in his carrier when normally he would be jumping all over the room exploring everything.

While we were there anyway I asked her to look at his gums to see how his gingivitis stomatitis was doing. Oh my. I could see his gums were red, raw and bleeding all over again just like his last bout with the disease back in March. Click here to read a post about it.  I asked her if this could be the cause of the anisocoria but she didn’t see a correlation. However, it was probably the reason for his odd behavior.

I decided to have a blood panel run anyway, just in case there was some other mysterious illness lurking in his body. She also gave him two follow-up shots for the gingivitis.

In the evening Frankie ate a little dinner then slept the night away on the bed. This morning he ate breakfast and was back to his perky, nuisance self. His right eye is still dilated a little more than the right one but nothing like yesterday.

So I’m thinking the inflammation from the gingivitis did indeed have something to do with the dilation of his eye.

I’m waiting to hear the result of his blood panel today. But at this point it’s a matter of watching him. And as the vet said yesterday, the best decision is probably to have all his teeth removed so he doesn’t have to suffer through this for the rest of his life. So I have to think about that.

This morning he was back helping me with my art project. Maybe you can see from the photo, his right pupil is a teensy bit bigger than the left. But at this moment in time, Frankie is giving everything thumbs up!

And for all you film buffs out there, this last photo is Freddie’s tribute to Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, Through a Screen Door Darkly.

All photos and content copyright roslyn m wilkins. Please feel free to pass along this post via email or social media, but if you wish to use some of our images or text outside of the context of this blog, either give full credit to myself and link to One Good Life in Los Angeles, or contact us for proper usage. Thanks!