Friday Four and More: First Time Mimi and the Kids Occupy the Desk, November 1, 2007

November 2, 2025 Bernadette

Mimi makes an appearance with her kids on my desk, and you can see how small she is in comparison to them—at only 12 weeks! I think her expression is trying to tell me to remove them so she can have her nap on my desk, which she had started to do now and then. These photos were taken on November 1, 2007, the first time of many that all five of them settled in to occupy the desk.

By this time visits from the Curious Quartet were daily for about an hour, then they went back upstairs so we could all get some work or napping done. Even then they played and explored, then came over to the human and wanted to be part of what I was doing. It’s about this time that they started bewitching me with these silhouettes of ears and sleek curled bodies…

Mimi kept going back in and out of heat and hadn’t been thriving and I was trying to keep her apart from the kittens but still give everyone normal socialization.* She is actually wearing a little bell collar because I was concerned she’d slip out the door. She usually stayed away when I brought the kittens down, but she hopped up onto the desk and started bathing their faces; unfortunately all those photos are blurry.

About this time she began to feel better, gained a little weight, and enjoyed time with Cookie and Kelly and Namir and Peaches, and with me too. She had begun having kittens so young that she missed out on a normal in-home relationship with humans and I always felt she thought she was just going to end up back outside so she didn’t want to get attached to any of us. Time helped to heal that one, and I know Cookie had a little talk with her too.

*Spay and neuter practices around here were still “traditional” in 2007 with no pediatric spay and neuter for friendly kittens—the Four were a little over 12 weeks then—and when veterinarians would not spay a cat in heat for the very real risks of bleeding out from the larger volume of blood when a cat is in heat (cats don’t have “periods” like us or “seasons” like dogs when they bleed, cats have multiple “heat” cycles and reabsorb the blood). Though the Homeless Cat Management Team was working hard in Pittsburgh they were only working with feral cats, who had no other options. There were no low-cost spay-neuter clinics like there have been for about a decade, but local shelter Animal Friends had a their “ABC (Animal Birth Control) program where they offered income-based spay/neuter certificates for $35 to be used at a participating veterinarian. I used five of those in February 2008!

So there they are at the beginning, and below from 2023.

Photo from a Previous Year

Three Senior Cats to the Veterinarian! October 24, 2023

Mimi, Mr. Sunshine and Giuseppe visit PetWellClinic for blood tests with some interesting results.

three black cats in exam room — I took my three most senior cats to PetWellClinic all at the same time.

So me and Mimi and Giuseppe and Mr Sunshine visited Pet Well Clinic for a senior cats party yesterday.

Mr. Sunshine: I know all about this place.

Giuseppe: why am I here and what am I supposed to do?

Mimi : what can I get into?

I finally managed to save enough to work on this care for them, not necessarily all three at once, but when it came down to deciding I couldn’t triage who was most important and who could wait. All three have needed veterinary services for a while, but of course Mewsette and Jelly Bean took precedence, and most of the money too. But Mr Sunshine needed a blood pressure check at least, Giuseppe needed a follow-up from his visit to MedVet in May, and poor Mimi hasn’t had an exam or blood tests in two years!

My regular veterinarian didn’t have any appointments for a while. I wanted to get this done while I have the money for it, and I feel an urgency after losing Mewsette and Jelly Bean because things happened so fast with both of them. I decided a visit to PetWellClinic for an exam with Dr. Sudberg and as many tests as I could afford was exactly what we needed. I didn’t want to just walk in with three cats knowing they needed a number of services like blood pressure checks and blood draws, both for the veterinarian’s and technicians’ schedule that day and to keep these three calm for as long as possible. I can check through my profile on the PetWellClinic site how many pets are in line and I waited until it was only four, packed these three up and put them in line in my account, then headed down.

No bad news, looks like no one has an end-of-life condition right now, though Mimi does have a slight heart murmur which I suspected, the boys blood pressures were sky high, 200 to 250 and 160 is high for a cat, somewhere between 130 and 140 is normal. But looking at the lack of other symptoms in Giuseppe like the dilated pupils and any trace of cardiac issues, he may be hyperthyroid like his siblings. Mr. Sunshine may need an extra medication for his blood pressure. They all came through it well but a little tired.

Mr Sunshine and Giuseppe both still had rather high blood pressure numbers. Mimi didn’t get a blood pressure reading.

Dr. Sudberg emailed me with the most important numbers on the test results this afternoon, and they emailed the full results over to me a few hours later. The most surprising/not surprising thing was that Giuseppe has hyperthyroid disease, but so does Mimi! This could be the reason for Giuseppe’s hypertension. I didn’t get Mr Sunshine checked for it yesterday, but we’ve had a hard time controlling Mr Sunshine’s blood pressure, and seeing that everyone else in his family has hyperthyroid disease and talking it over with Dr. Sudberg and Dr. Goodell today, I’m going to get him T4 tested and see where his numbers are. Mr. Sunshine also has heart disease, but it could be that hyperthyroid disease has been making it more difficult to control. Mr. Sunshine doesn’t have any of the other symptoms of hyperthyroid disease, nor does Mimi, but Giuseppe clearly has for the past few months.

It makes me leery of the outcome…both Mewsette and Jelly Bean developed hyperthyroid disease first, then really started to fail fast and ended up with lymphoma, which may have moved in when they were weakened by an overactive thyroid. All had high numbers, 7 and above. Giuseppe’s was 3.7 in May, Mr. Sunshine’s was 1.7 in May. Mimi’s was 2.3 in 2021, all in the normal range.

Mimi now weighs five pounds, has a little bit of a heart murmur, and other than that just some slightly skewed blood levels, but still excellent for being 20.

Everyone has a little ear infection. Got medication for that.

two black cats — Mr. Sunshine purrs loudly and licks Giuseppe to comfort him.

Giuseppe was pretty anxious after his exam, blood draw and blood pressure reading, but Mr. Sunshine was stationed under the exam table and turned his healing purr up to 10 so Giuseppe and all the rest of us benefited from it. Mr. Sunshine does that to calm himself, but plenty of times I could hear him when he was spooning with Mewsette. Angel, the veterinary technician who took the readings and drew blood, said it was like hearing white noise and could make him a little drowsy. I told him that Mr. Sunshine was the comfort for the family, the caretaker.

So starting some new medications and then retests for all in 2 to 3 weeks. But I’m glad to see that other than that they are all in quite good health otherwise—I’ve been so happy with the improvements I’ve seen in appetite, activity level and general health in Mr. Sunshine and Giuseppe since they’ve been going outdoors, and Mimi is just amazing. Just hoping they stay that way, and the dreaded lymphoma doesn’t show up anytime soon.

I will take Mr. Sunshine back for his T4 test as soon as I can get the money together, since this really cleaned me out, then everyone needs to go back for retests in two to three weeks as well as blood pressure readings.

Please send purrs!

Even these are sweet memories, though the results were distressing, and especially Giuseppe’s behavior, totally out of his gregarious, adventurous typical behavior. This photo was close enough to the little gathering on my desk that they show how close they were, all along.

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