{"id":8105,"date":"2026-08-21T09:30:44","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T07:30:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/?p=8105"},"modified":"2026-08-21T10:29:07","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T08:29:07","slug":"the-shape-of-gone-things","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/2026\/08\/21\/the-shape-of-gone-things\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shape of Gone Things"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There are things that are the most visible when they’re no longer there. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Gone<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Lately, our oldest pet, MiniBeastie (of her real name IV as in Ivy and cat number 4) has not been well. She started coughing and not breathing well in the winter. At first we attributed it to some passing illness or hairballs. And it was coming and going, so it seemed a sensible diagnosis. Things were mostly fine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But by early May she started doing it more. So we decided to take her to the vet. There, he wasn’t sure what was happening: she didn’t have any fever so it wasn’t an infection, but he could hear noises in her breathing. So he decided we needed to do an x-ray to see what was happening. On the x-ray, we discovered a past history that we had never known about: when she was a kitten, she had been hit by something, possibly a car. She had ribs forming sharp angles, not parallel to each other. Her thorax was generally messed up but healed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We adopted her when she was a few months old. I had discovered her when she was sneaking into my office where our outdoor cat, Mowers, was sleeping at night and eating. She would come in when he wasn’t there (she was scared of him, he was several times her size and territorial), and eat his food. At the first sound of someone coming, she’d bolt out of the office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, we started to feed her in the garden because risking being cornered by Mowers wasn’t great. She got more bold, but always wary of us and Mowers. She would let us get near (but not really touch her). One day, she started coming into our kitchen and my wife closed the door. She was in and would never come out again. We couldn’t worry about her all the time, she was too small to fend for herself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a>
Her favourite spot<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

13 years later, the x-ray also showed dark masses the vet thought were damage due to the car hitting her all those years ago, but it also showed that her thorax appeared foggy: that was probably fluid. So his tentative diagnosis was that she had Congestive Hart Failure (CHF). Broadly, her hart was weak and wasn’t beating hard enough and it was filling her lungs with fluid. So he put her under diuretic to clear that up as much as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first it worked well, she breathed better for a while. A month later she started struggling again and breathing with her mouth open. That’s a bad sign for a cat. So we did some research and asked for an ACE inhibitor from the vet. That helped again for a while. Then she started not to eat, so the vet gave her a steroid. That worked, though it was really hard on her stomach and we had to switch to injections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the last few days, she went from eating well and putting weight back on to not eating again and she was really struggling with her breathing. We called the vet and told is to come about 1.5 hour later. On the way to the vet, only a couple of minutes away, she started making strange noises when she was breathing. By the time we got to the vet, she couldn’t breathe anymore and her heart stopped. She had a lung haemorrhage due to her illness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now of course, lots of places remind us of her and highlight her absence: the back of the sofa where she used to sleep during the day, the window sill in the bathroom upstairs where she used to spent her awake time watching the garden, our empty bed in the morning where she used to come without fail to have her belly rubbed until she fell asleep.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2025-2026 have been bad years: my grandmother (100 years -1 day), my dad (74 years), our cat MiniBeastie (13 years). Time is relentless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

#Pets #MiniBeastie<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are things that are the most visible when they’re no longer there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8105"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8135,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8105\/revisions\/8135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photoni.st\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}