Goodbye William

This one hurts a little more because he’s been part of our lives for so long…13 years…

We had to say goodbye to William, our first cat. He’d been having some health issues for some time, some of it respiratory, although we found it appeared he had a food allergy to rice that is in most cat food — the Lord graciously granted Sue think of this…feeding him only food with no rice (and we tried to keep wheat away too) seemed to really help him not have any more sinus problems.

Recently though, he started losing weight. But, he was eating fairly normally, and drinking and excreting nicely. With the extreme heat here, we both figured it was related to that, and never really thought to research it. He also seemed very sensitive to the heat but figured it was his age (he was probably around 14 years old), and just kept him laying on ice under dish towels with blue ice bags around, which seemed to help. Well, for whatever reason, I did research last week, and it appears he had all the classic signs of hyperthyroidism — weight loss even with appetite, drinking a lot and peeing a lot, sensitive to heat, panting, etc. Upon further research, there were various things to try naturally, and so we had shipped to us some L-Carnitine, which is one thing that is potentially lacking in this type of situation. But the day it arrived, even though he seemed not that bad in the morning, by late evening, he was gone. 🙁 Thankfully, we were with him as he was going, and Sue was able to be there right at the end.

William, who was named after William III, also known as William of Orange, Protestant king of England, and because our William was the color…wait for it…orange :D, had been rummaging around our neighbor’s garbage, and they were going to permanently “remove” him, but offered him to us in case we wanted him. We had never had a cat before, I used to be allergic to them, but I went there, and the neighbor girl was holding him, and I looked at him, and said we’d take him. There’s more detail in the original post we did on him.

One thing he will be remembered for is how he would almost always join Sue and me for Psalm singing time during our little family worship time. Here’s a little more detail, but I am including the video here again of him doing that:

He was also the inspiration for the first lullaby I wrote, “Hey You Sleepy Head” (I didn’t write it for or to him…it was meant for humans 🙂 )

One time William was chasing around a stray cat, and had it cornered around our camper, but to keep William from the other cat in case it had diseases, I reached down to grab William to take him away. Note, do not do that when a cat is in that mode. William turned and bit the back of my hand. Well, if you know anything about cat bites, it swelled really badly, I had to do I think at least a couple rounds of antibiotics plus soaking my hand in Epsom salts before it went away. But, now I also have a permanent reminder of William as the ring finger on that hand will not straighten as high as the other fingers: