He spent half the year outside, then got rather ill in the fall, so I took him to the vet and then put him under house arrest. He recovered but I noticed he was sleeping about 23 hours/day. But then he was sleeping a lot outside, too.
Then around Feb of this year I noticed he had a bad upper respiratory condition, lots of coughing and sneezing and gurgling. Back to the vet, and the bad news was he had acute leukemia. Since he was almost 18 y.o. I opted not to go for chemo, just tried to make his last days as comfortable and happy as possible. Well you can probably guess the rest... he stopped eating, and was losing weight fast (about a pound a week). The last few days I took him back out to the garden to enjoy the scenery from the safety of my lap. Eventually I had to agree with the vet that it was time to put him to "sleep". It all went so fast, I wish I could have had even more time with him, but he'd had a good life, relatively speaking.
When he was younger he wandered a bit, although I had a big yard and he tended to stay there, or just over the fence in a neighbor's yard. He was the bane of mice, rats, and even squirrels, until he got too old to catch them.
After all that, I decided not to get another cat, at least not right away. Plus I'm a bit allergic to them and figure it's time to give my sinuses a rest, too.
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