Loopy Doopy Doo

she was my favorite

Oh Loopy.

Over the course of the last six months, our older, gray cat started showing signs of … honestly, I’m not sure what to call it. She was just unkempt. Not that she was ever particularly kempt¹ to begin with, but her long, fluffy fur was always well-cared for, clean, and as groomed as she could manage. When her coat started to become oily, and she ended up with what looked like blackheads on her skin, the vet shared our concerns.

“Hmmm. There’s a collar that can help restore the skin barrier and bring her some comfort,” she said. “It smells strongly of lavender when you first put it on her, but that’ll fade after a few days.”

Excellent. So we bought the cat collar that smelled like the sachets of potpourri my nana used to keep in her bathroom. Loopy improved, for a short while.

And then things went off the rails a bit more. Her fur, which had been groomed close to help with matting, wasn’t growing back. She was unusually lethargic. And she suddenly didn’t have hair on her ears. One afternoon, as Loopy padded away from us, my daughter said, “Loopy’s belly looks enormous.”

Sure enough, the cat had become a potbellied beast seemingly over the course of a week, with her belly jutting out and no discernible weight gain anywhere else on her body. Not normal. Back to the vet we went.

“Has her appetite changed?”

“Yes. She’s voracious. She wants food all the time,” I said. This was our third visit in less than two months, checking on Loopy’s different discomforts.

“Drinking more?”

“Hard to tell, but I think so. Are you thinking diabetes?”

“Maybe. Let’s get a blood sugar check on her now,” the vet said. Suddenly they were pricking Loopy’s ear and checking her blood sugar on a meter so old that I think I used it at Clara Barton Camp back in the day.

“Hmmm. 306 mg/dL.” The vet frowned. “This could be because she’s stressed about being here at the vet, but that’s pretty high. Could you bring her back here in a day or two for a second check?”

The cat hated visiting the vet. The team there actually had a term for how much time they’d have with Loopy before she started to lose her shit. “Uh oh,” they’d say when the growl would thunder from the back of her kitty throat. “We’ve run out of Loopy minutes.”

In efforts to keep the Loopy minutes at their highest levels, I offered, “I have the means to check her blood sugar at home. Would that be something you’d feel comfortable with? I have a Freestyle Lite meter and some test strips that I could use.”

After I’d told them I’ve had diabetes for a leaf pile of years, they asked me to get some blood sugars for Loopy: a couple fasting numbers and some post-prandials. It was easier said than done, procuring that data. Even though my hands were practiced with a lancet and a meter, it was very strange trying to draw blood from my cat’s ear. After failing twice and feeling guilty, I remembered that the vet said we could prick the “toe beans" to get a sample, and that worked beautifully.

To her credit, Loopy was very tolerant. She didn’t mind the lancet so long as someone else rubbed her behind the ears at the same time. She also didn’t mind having to return to the vet for a fructosamine test, aka the “kitty A1C,” which confirmed a feline diabetes diagnosis. And she didn’t really enjoy the injections of Lantus that we needed to give her twice a day, but even those weren’t too dodgy. She received a unit every 12 hours, injected underneath her skin.

She was still cute. And still cuddly. But her blood sugars were still high. And her hair wasn’t growing back. And her bladder was difficult to control. And her potbelly was bigger. (The vet said, sweetly and without malice: “She’s an older cat and her body is changing,” and I felt so protective of my middle-aged cat with diabetes and strange changes and was like, “She’s still a dignified lady, damn it!” I may have been projecting a bit.)

Then she had an incident where she excreted what looked like blood — not good.

Back to the vet.

After many tests and a flurry of data gathering, the vet diagnosed Loopy with Cushing’s disease. More common in dogs, this was a rare find in a cat. It often presents alongside a diabetes diagnosis, the symptoms of both conditions exacerbating and also somewhat masking their respective diseases. After further testing, we discovered that her Cushing’s disease was advanced. The prognosis was not good.

The days that followed were hard for our cat, and a few weeks ago, Loopy passed away.

Admittedly, I was a mess.

I really liked that cat. She was grumpy and quiet but she always had enough patience for her people. She sat on the couch with us at night with her little paws curled underneath her body like she was a loaf of freshly baked whole wheat bread. She would lay on my office rug and scoot her cat-napping self around the floor as I typed, depending on where the sunbeam came through the window. Sometimes it looked like she was actually watching TV with us², rooting for specific people on Alone. She sat in the front hallway, behind the glass of the storm door, a furry sentinel as neighbors and friends drove in and out of the neighborhood.

Loopy sat with me almost every morning, before the kids would come downstairs to have breakfast, turning around several times on my lap before settling in and kneading my legs. I’d drink my coffee, she would shed all over my pants, and I’d scritch her behind the ears. She’d lean in and purr until a kid would drop a fork or slam a door, and she’d inevitably startle, launching from my lap. But the space would be warm, where she was. And I miss that.

The vet sent us a card after Loopy had died: “Despite her growly self, Loopy has grown to become one of my favorite and most memorable patients.”

Thank you, Loopy, for giving us as many Loopy minutes as you could.

1. It’s not 100% a word people use now, but with unkempt literally meaning “not well-combed,” it felt okay to shave off the “un” and make Loopy in her heyday proper kempt.

2.