Something wasn’t right. She was sitting perfectly still in her trademark tea-cosy pose, with her tail and all four paws neatly tucked beneath her. But her pure white flanks were heaving up and down as if she had just raced in from the furthest reaches of the olive grove. She hadn’t though. For the previous hour or so she had simply been dozing in the warmth of the autumn sun that was shining in through the sitting room window.
On reflection, she had been a little out of sorts for a few days, with little interest in food. Normally she would crunch her way through her daily allowance of turkey biscuits with an eagerness that sometimes bordered on greed. And even if she wasn’t hungry at a given moment, she still needed to know that food was there. Faced with an empty bowl, however, there was none of that undignified rubbing up against our legs nonsense. No, she would simply sit by her bowl and fix us with an icy, unblinking stare for as long as it would take for one of us to bend to her will and top up her turkey biscuits – and then calmly walk away with a slightly imperious flick of her tail without taking a bite. Rather like the way she would flop down onto her back to have her tummy stroked, but always just beyond the reach of her chosen stroker, thus obliging them to stand up and go to her – which, of course, was the primary object of the exercise.
Other than this loss of appetite, there was nothing we could put a finger on; just a certain listlessness and apathy that those who didn’t know her well probably would not have detected as she was such a placid, gentle creature. Self-contained and independent, she didn’t sit on laps and wasn’t keen on being held, but would regularly sleep at the foot of our bed, would often seek out our company and given the opportunity would happily spend all day being scratched behind the ears or under the chin. Now, though, our sweet-natured companion and confidante whose calming presence eased our loneliness when one or other of us was on our own for any length of time seemed indifferent to our touch.
She had been so contented here too: ever since she had arrived home with Mr Blue-Shirt just before Christmas she had loved the place. Within little more than a couple of days’ tentative exploration of all the nooks and crannies, she had decided her new home passed muster and tea-cosied up on a dining chair that gave her a view of the whole of the ground floor and from which she could keep a watchful eye on all our comings and goings. After a couple of weeks’ being confined to quarters, she made it known that she was ready to go outside and see what else her new surroundings had to offer. Mr Blue-Shirt and I were quite ridiculously nervous as we opened the back door and watched her trot off down the garden and disappear into the undergrowth, with – thankfully – the occasional flash of white among the greenery to indicate her whereabouts. For we could not have been more nervous had we been waving our child off at the gate on their first day at school.
But from that point on there was no looking back. She took to being outside with joy and enthusiasm, spending hours exploring beneath bushes, hunting bugs in the grass, chewing twigs, catching feathers and climbing trees, which was something that we had never once seen her even try to do in the UK. Back in Lincolnshire, in fact, she seldom went outside at all, and even when she did, just sat and watched the world go by. The heavy snow of late February wasn’t quite her thing, though: I have a wonderful photo of an almost perfect circle of paw prints in the snow taken when she had pestered and pestered to go out. When I had finally opened the door, she had cautiously tip-toed out into the crisp deep snow – and almost immediately executed a neat U-turn, deciding that curling up in front of the fire was much the better option after all. But as soon as spring had arrived, she was back outside from dawn to dusk, striding among the olive trees to confirm all was well on ‘her patch’. With the tip of her tail twitching, she would be out there chasing butterflies, catching leaves and sniffing daisies; the very embodiment of ‘bright-eyed and bushy-tailed’. Come summer her favourite pastimes alternated between batting seed pods and lounging in the shade of our huge deep green bay tree; sneaking off for a snooze under a lavender bush and chasing the bright green lizards darting hither and thither, her blue eyes sparkling as brightly as the distant Adriatic Sea.
Not anymore. It seemed as if a light had gone out. And with her little rib-cage rising and falling so alarmingly, taking her to the vet seemed the only option. We had always known she had a heart murmur, and every day for some months not long after we had got her Mr Blue-Shirt had attempted to squirt down her throat the medicine that had been prescribed for her condition while she thrashed and kicked and tried to wriggle from his grasp. Some 80% of cats apparently have a heart murmur, though, and since far more than 20% of the cats we have known have lived a long and happy life without any medication, we soon decided to stop subjecting her to this daily ordeal. Leading a happy and stress-free, but possibly shortened life, we reasoned, was surely preferable to leading a longer one, but one where every day was filled with anxiety and distress. We suddenly feared that this decision might be coming back to haunt us.
A bear of a man with a bushy beard, a warm smile and enormous hands, Dr Barbucci probed Mimi’s sides with remarkable tenderness. Our conversation was an odd mix of Italian and English: our Italian vocabulary does not extend to veterinary terminology, and his English vocabulary consisted only of veterinary terminology. But we got there somehow: an X-ray revealed an enlarged heart, but not the cause, and the murmur was still present. Added to which, blood tests indicated that she was also anaemic. Dr Barbucci’s smile had gone and concern was now written all over his face. “She is many sick” he said in his heavily accented English, gently tickling Mimi’s neck with a single huge finger. Before we had a chance to ask what he could do, he explained that in order to prescribe a course of treatment, he needed to establish why her heart was enlarged and to get to the bottom of the murmur and so recommended that we take her for an ECG at a veterinary cardiologist’s in Civitanova Marche. We struggled to take this all in, shocked and dismayed by the obvious seriousness of her condition, but it was a no-brainer: of course we’d take her to the cardiologist – a Dr Crotti. I asked for his details, saying I would call the next morning. But Dr Barbucci shook his head and immediately called Dr Crotti’s surgery to get an appointment that same afternoon. “He can see you now,” he said as he hung up. “His surgery is here.” He scrawled a quick map and gently lifted Mimi back into her travel box. Mr Blue-Shirt and I exchanged fear-filled looks and following a hurried “Grazie mille,” we climbed back into the car and in heavy silence drove down the hill towards the coast, dreading what the next hour might bring…
Ms Marche 