Amelia Coates 39  

Just a few things about me...

1. 
   
   My cats are my children
   
   
   
   
   
   
   








2. 
   
   
   
   "When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade without further introduction."                                                                                       Mark Twain  I feel exactly the same.
   
   
   
   





3. 
   
   
   
   I absolutely will not tolerate animal abuse!
   
   
   
   
   




4. 
   
   Hunters are despicable.  Anyone who hunts and claims he loves animals is not only an evil moron, he is an oxymoron!
   
   



5. 
   
   My kitties always always ALWAYS come first!!!              
   
6. •   I have had the honour & pure pleasure of growing up in a wonderful home where animals were loved.  I was taught to give them love and respect and they would give you their unconditional love in return.  In my childhood home beginning when I--the youngest of 5 girls--was 6 years old, we had cats.  From the day we found George, our very first, a mama cat, in our compost can on a sweltering hot summer day, to the present, (45 years later) I have not been without cats.        
   • George and I grew up together, she was my baby playing house and she was the very best and well-behaved baby you could hope for!  She loved--well, she never hissed or scratched about it--being dressed up in doll clothes and playing her part.  She would follow my sisters and I to school and when we got to school one of us would go in and call Mama and she'd come get George and take her back home!  She would also wit outside the bank for Dad to walk home (1/2 a block) with him.  She was  an awesome sister cat!
   • George had 4 litters of kittens before we finally found a vet that would do her surgery.  My dad was well-known in our small town and the surrounding small towns and they were also mostly farm animal vets in those days not used to doing little animals.  She had Toby, Tabitha and Samantha in the first litter.  Our folks let us girls name them except Dad named Toby.  So, as with George, we got Samantha's and Tabitha's names wrong.  And, as with George, Samantha and Tabitha loved their names and wouldn't have had us change them for anything!  The next litter was Tigger, Madeline, Smudgepot, and Rufus.  The next litter was Reuben and Ralph and for once we got them right!  The last litter was just one--PinklePurr. 
     
   • We kept Toby, Samantha and Tabitha.  Loved them so very much.  Sadly one day about 2 weeks before Christmas of 1971, we lost our Toby at the tender age of 1 year and 3 months from a brain tumor.  This was my first experience with death of a family member and it hurts to this day. 
     
   • We kept Smudgepot, and my second oldest sister who had just gotten married, took Rufus and Madeline though it disturbed us that she changed their names to General Motors and Sadie.  She found a home for Tigger with a friend of hers.  We were skepticle.  Tigger didn't last a week, this person let her outdoors and she got run over.  We were heartsick!  Then, Reuben and Ralph... Mom found a home in the country for them and assumed they were going to be house cats... Our last tragedy, for awhile.  We kept Pinkle.  We had a feral mama named GladysAnne and her babies Fraidy and Tsubbie.  Once we finally got them to trust us we took them to my third sister's farm and they lived happily in the barn for many years.
     
   • Samantha was 12 years old when he died from feline leukemia.  Melinda, my sister one up from me, brought home a cat she named QueeGee and he was immediately accepted by all.  We got Mama a cat, Jenny, for mother's day, and she too, was immediately accepted.  I had a white cat at college named Bustopher whom I shared with my roommate and she and her mom ended up keeping him in Des Moines.  I rescued a tuxedo from being euthanized for no reason, named him BooBoo, and he was accepted also.  He was my very first child cat.  Then Melinda found a starving kitten in the middle of the street wailing and we brought him in    and fed him.  He was filthy and full of fleas so we cleaned him and dried him then cleaned him again a few hours later.  We got rid of the fleas.  He was absolutely gorgeous, long-haired amber and brown striped tabby with beautiful eyes.  Fabio!  We all fell head over heels in love with Fabio!  He was the right age for his little man surgery so we took him to our vet.  We waited for the call to come telling us how it went.  Then it came.  They had given him too much anesthesia on accident and he was gone.  Not even a year old.  They were sorry they said.  They know it was a terrible error.  They know we haven't had time to come to grips with his death but they have a kitten on their farm that looks almost like him.  Do we want to come see her in a few days? So, we said we would.  We fell in love with Lilo.  But the vet said Lilo was a girl... The vet got Lilo wrong!  After Lilo, roughly 6 years, my parents needed to go into a nursing home... My "being an RN living in Des Moines and coming home on weekends to care for them" days were over so I moved back to my hometown and got a job in the nursing home and took care of my folks.  I would bring Lilo on my days off to visit them as they missed them so much.  Lilo was one who would go anywhere, do anything, and not one bit of complaint, as long as you held him he would just cuddle.  Jenny in the meantime could not cope with Mom and Dad being gone and began gnawing away every hair she could reach down to her skin.  She had a scared and far away look in her eyes.  We tried everything from Ovaban to Valium and nothing worked. 
     
   • My dad passed away December 11,1995.   He was 76.
     
   • Jenny couldn't cope; she stopped eating.  Then she just gave up and QueeGee was giving up too.  They wouldn't eat, or drink, they weren't even meowing to each other or me.  They were  just giving up on life.  When they were literally shutting down, I took both of them to be euthanized together, crying all the way there, and when I got in my empty car, I cried the 25 miles home.
     
   •  There were days, weeks where I lost track of everything.  I still had my mama but something told me I was losing her too.  
     
   • I got married June 28, 1997.    I should have been happy on my wedding day.  But, everything was just a bit wrong to me.  I didn't have my dad to give me away, the brother-in-law that I really don't like gave me away instead, the flowers were wrong, the seating arrangements were wrong, table arrangements had my mama way down away from me and I was between my mother-in-law and step-mother-in-law.  There was supposed to be room for her wheelchair and there wasn't.  I could see my Mama crying softly to herself.   She wasn't supposed to be sad.  It just wasn't anything I expected it to be. 
     
   • I had Mama for 2 more years.  She passed away December 7,1999.  She was 73.