Bruce is FIV positive, moves inside
Bruce is FIV positive, moves inside
May 22, 2003
My sweet, gentle, homeless cat Bruce got tested a little while ago and while he does not have feline leukemia, he does have FIV. So sad. I hadn’t had him tested when I took him to be neutered. Right now he does not have symptoms and may live many years in a healthy state.
It turns out that homeless intact Myron was not being friendly at all to Bruce those nights when he came onto my porch while Bruce was sleeping. I knew Bruce did not want Myron sniffing around him so closely, since Bruce would let out loud wails if Myron came right up to him, but Bruce seemed as if he didn’t mind if Myron wanted to rest on the other side of the porch. But, Myron was actually testing Bruce’s “defenses” and wanted to takeover the territory. Early this morning my husband woke up to loud cat fight sounds, and saw Myron and Bruce fighting in the back yard feeding area. My husband ran out of the house, barefoot, to save Bruce. It was a serious kind of fight, but Bruce has no marks, just a bunch of his gray fur on the grass that got pulled out.
Bruce had run off, and we went out looking for him. He came up to the porch where we, (and Penelope, his companion stray) were waiting for him to come home. My husband decided that we would make Bruce an indoor cat after all. That would be happy news, if only today’s test had different results. We set up Bruce in our guest room that has a connecting bathroom to spend a few hours so and Bruce and I could get some sleep. I called in sick today (but honestly didn’t feel swell) to tend to the matter of getting him to the vet. The plan was to have him live outside during the day, and then sleep in at night, until full integration was achieved.
We had moved the small cat pen to another part of our yard, since my husband is in the process of building a bigger pen by the house. Bruce is in it now, so he could get some fresh air and maybe eliminate. (He didn’t use the litter box in our house all those hours.) We will then have him in the guest “suite” tonight. We both do have to go to work tomorrow, so will have to leave him inside until we get home, then will put him in the pen for a few hours of fresh air and views of his world. We can’t keep this up for long, though.
May 23, 2003
Yikes! Bruce doesn’t know about litter boxes! Poor fellow. He was urgently meowing and meowing at around 3 AM, for what I now know was to be let outside to what he knows as the bathroom. Poor guy finally just had to go, #1 and 2. He urinated on the bed, but when he started to defecate, I quickly put the litter box on the bed and put him in it. He went in it, then tried to “cover it” by scratching on the blankets. I think he is super for not wanting to go in the house and really trying to tell me what the problem was.
He is learning, though. This morning when I went in that bathroom, I saw him coming out of the litter box and then scratching at the floor in front of it, to “cover” whatever he did. It’s a start. He needs a longer box.
One concern is that his feces were terribly smelly, the consistency of pudding, and a mustard color yellow. Hope it’s not the FIV rearing it’s head but just some food/stress related thing.