I have no patience for people who tell pet stories. It strikes me as wasteful to spend that much time and emotion on an animal when there are children starving in the world.

Clearly, I'm an idiot, and God is teaching me something. Yes, I should care about the children who are starving, but there is a reason that he put animals in our lives.

As I've mentioned, I have a fur-baby (a very, very furry fur baby) who is wasting away in front of me. The unofficial diagnosis is FIP (Feline infectious peritonitis) but there is no test for the actual infection. There is also no cure. The vet told me on Tuesday that there is nothing she can do for him.

There is some awful irony here. I have another cat, Hoot, who was once half of a matched set--Hoot 'n' Anny. His sister Anny went to her reward in August of 2004, almost 10 years after a vet in Nashville removed a lot of her FIP-ravaged girl parts when she was spayed. I remember the doctor offering to diagnose her (for a ridiculous amount of money) and then telling me that there was nothing he could do to save her once he diagnosed her. I told him how ridiculous that sounded to me, and he sent her home. She never was a fat, thriving cat, but she seemed happy for the rest of her life.

I was about to talk about the irony of that. I never knew FIP was contagious. Smudge probably got it from Anny and it has been dormant in him all this time.

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