Sad news about Girly

I'm afraid there's some bad news to announce. Our well-loved cat, Girly, died yesterday. It was all quite sudden and bizarre and made for a miserable day.

For a little over a week she'd been getting nosebleeds. They'd come and go, but throughout she seemed to be just fine. She didn't act ill. She ate normally and was her nervous, lovely self. But yesterday morning, while I (David) was at work, her nose began to really bleed. Gudrun and the kids bundled her up and took her to the vet. It was clear straightaway that the vets thought it was grave. They tested her blood and found her clotting slow. They also gave her an epinephrine injection to close up the bleeding. They wanted to keep her in, so Gudrun and the kids had just arrived back home - I was there too now - when the vet called to say that Girly had gone into cardiac arrest.

The vets think - they're not really providing any other answers - that Girly was poisoned, probably by some sort of rat poison that she found someplace, or by contact with a mouse that had recently been poisoned. This is a bit hard to understand, considering the apartment we live in and Girly's unadventurous behavior. But there it is. That's what happened.

The kids are very upset about it, of course. Maya in particular was devastated. It was hard to watch, especially as they came back from the vet quite happy to have put her in caregiving hands. So when the phone rang with that news none of us expected it at all.

So, anyway, we're going to collect her ashes and eventually release them - perhaps back in Massachusetts.