Episode: 2074
Title: HPR2074: Experience With A Neighborhood Cat
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2074/hpr2074.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 14:00:26

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This is HPR Episode 2074 entitled Experience with a Neighborhood Cut.
It is hosted by Brian and is about 15 minutes long.
The summary is a show about a cut.
Warning, repeat, warning, contains content that will be disturbing to some.
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Hello Hacker Public Radio.
This is Brian.
I'd like to talk about a recent experience that I had with the Neighborhood Cut.
This cut is known by the name Joe.
That name was given to him as far as I know by my neighbor.
He's lived next door to me for a few years longer than I've lived in my house.
And I've lived in my house for almost four years now.
And this cut has been around.
He was an old timer friendly.
Let me go visit say hi type of cut.
You couldn't approach him as most cats that were unfamiliar with you by walking straight at him.
You had to kind of walk around pretend you weren't paying any attention to him.
You had your own thing going on.
You had to make him curious.
He might sneak up behind you and then you could pet him.
My estimation is that Joe was at least 10 years old.
Maybe it doesn't or more.
It's really hard to say with a stray cat.
If you were a house cat, I'd put him in that 16, 17 year range.
I haven't seen him at all this year, 2016.
It's June now.
And I don't recall seeing him this winter.
The other day I stepped out on my porch.
I sit on my couch, smoke a cigarette.
As I'm walking out, I just got my coffee, said hi to my cat,
who is sleeping soundly on some furniture in the living room.
And I sit down on my porch and I hear what sounds like a cat walking up my steps.
And it's a long staircase.
There's a missing step.
So it's not the easiest staircase for any injured party to be walking up.
But I just thought that I was hearing things, standard hallucinations.
As they say, there was a study that said 9 out of 10 of us,
a regular hallucinations of that sort.
Hearing something, not sure what it is, did someone knock on my door,
is someone calling my name, stuff like that.
For me, my major hallucinations are with animals.
I hear cats whining, meowing, dogs whimpering.
And it turns out to be some neighborhood kids playing or whatever.
But that's just me based on my own conditioning.
The odd thing about this was I looked down and there's Joe.
And he looks up at me and meows very weakly.
And he weighed four pounds.
I know this, I'll get to that later.
He comes inside while he was adamant.
He put his head into the crack of the door and just pushed on that crack
and wouldn't move and said, I am coming in.
And I opened the door and he just walked in and looked at me.
I tried to give him some water, he took a few sips of water.
But he wasn't really happy with it.
He had severe oral infections.
This is very common in cats, which usually caused by them not chewing their food,
by getting excess canned food.
There's a number of reasons for it.
And it tends to eventually lead to such severe infection in old age
that they develop anorexia, they basically stop eating.
There are other reasons I don't think that that's what happened to Joe.
What I think happened to Joe is that he got severe advanced oral cancer.
It looked to me like the packs of cigarettes that I have gotten in Canada
where more than 50% of the packages covered in graphic images of oral cancers.
And it looked exactly like that, but that was much later.
Right now it just looked mouth infection.
His skin's all covered in pus.
He's fairly clean.
For an outside cat he's a little nappy, but his skin was totally clean.
His fur was totally clean, he's a black and white cat.
He was white except for his paws and his chin.
Because he was sleeping on his paws and it was leaking all over.
I had a prior engagement that I needed to go to
that there was no way that I could do very much more
than set him up with a really cool, comfortable spot in my tool zone
under my porch, give him some water.
He laid out in the grass.
I cleaned his infection up.
I rinsed his mouth with a GSE solution.
And then flushed with some water and he got some water in him.
He drank more than a can in a half's worth of tuna water.
He tried to eat the fish, but it hurt, so he couldn't.
And he drank the water and he went outside.
He peed.
He played with me with a string.
He went up and down my steps.
He was just emaciated with the lack of muscle
that he had not been able to eat for so long.
And it's hard to say exactly what the rest of that is.
With the older cats, the anorexia tends to develop
into a renal failure situation.
He seemed so healthy all the way around.
There was no swelling or anything that was out of place
or uncomfortable on my inspection of him.
But I was really concerned with my experience
not in the expertise realm dealing with cat diseases.
So I do have a cat and I was semi-concerned
that there may be something I'm not familiar with
that could be a contagious thing that I should be worried about.
So he was outside.
We left.
We went to our engagement.
We were gone for over five hours when we came back.
I couldn't find him outside.
I looked in the basement.
I looked around.
I couldn't find him.
I figured I hope he comes back tomorrow.
And he seemed strong enough that I thought that he would
and left some accident happened.
Now I didn't see him all day.
Near...
I don't recall when it was maybe four o'clock or so.
My girlfriend goes down to do a load of laundry
and sees him sleeping in the pilot dirty clothes.
And she brings him in and he looks so much worse.
But he looks so much better.
His infection had very little evidence of pus
and his chin was covered in dried blood,
which means that the infection had drained
and the blood had come through.
And I just hope that it had flushed itself enough
that that much was gone and then I could do a further inspection.
After getting him cleaned up this time,
which of course took so much longer with all the dried blood,
I really saw that his mouth was extremely poor.
And there was an odor that lingered.
I cleaned all of his fur and his mouth
and there was no more odor of infection.
There was no odor of rot
and there was no odor of death.
But there was this other odor that I was unfamiliar with.
I had heard that advanced cancer has a distinct odor.
And there's this sweet kind of fins lingering
along with that rod infectious death smell.
Those three smells I'm very familiar with.
This was not any of them.
And it was something else.
And I believe it was cancer.
My girlfriend says, okay, he's cleaned up.
I want to bring him to the vet,
make sure there's no contagious.
Hopefully they can get some fluids into him
and help his dehydration because he was so emaciated.
And his mouth dirty didn't even want to drink water.
So we bring him to the vet.
Super long ordeal.
I was hoping for some subcutaneous saline
so that the body can just absorb it.
That's a very common procedure.
I'm not sure why that didn't come out perhaps.
It was the stress revolving around the entire situation.
That that was extremely busy.
There were tons of walk-ins, emergencies.
He got super stressed out.
We got super stressed out.
We ended up just bringing him home
and saying the vet visit did supply
at least some comfort in the fact
that they were not concerned of any contagious anything
and that our assessment was pretty close to theirs.
What upset me was all of the treatment that they recommended
was only treatment.
That was geared towards trying to save this animal's life,
doing tests for this and that and putting them on IVs and catheters.
That is just not what he needed.
He needed hospice.
This cat was far beyond trying to help.
He wanted mom to lick his head.
That's one of the most comforting things
that any cat can experience is someone just licking their head.
The most softest pet with your finger
that feels like a cat tongue on the head.
They calm down so quick.
Being clean is extremely important to them too.
This cat had a spark in his eyes.
He was not ready to go.
I was not going to have him put down
and I was not going to give this vet thousands of dollars
so that they can have him die in their care
while they're scrambling to save his life.
His life was done.
He lived it.
He wanted it to be comfortable.
So, got him cleaned up, got him home,
gave him a little towel bed on the bed next to us.
He laid there nice and warm with a heating pad on.
Next day, he didn't do much moving around.
He just laid there.
He lifted him a few times when he'd wake up.
Say, I'm a little uncomfortable.
A rinse his mouth out with some water.
He was definitely not drinking.
He was definitely not eating.
He was towards the end.
But he was comfortable.
And after giving him a little second hand,
marijuana smoke, he calmed down.
I can't believe I didn't think of that the day before.
The THC receptors in the neurological system
of the human body are not just for the human body.
They are true for the entire mammalian species
or whatever that is.
I'm not a biologist, so species is probably the wrong word.
But the entire mammalian neurological system
has these THC receptors, has these CBD receptors.
They have known benefits.
He calmed down.
He was so pleasant, laid on my chest.
His breathing wasn't labored.
He stretched out his paws.
It went apart really long and then curled up.
And I sat with him for a while later.
I put him down half an hour after them.
I rolled from picked him up on him outside.
He sat on her lap.
He stretched out as far as he could.
Twitch just paws.
And was gone.
And now he's buried out in the backyard
with a couple other cats under a flax bush.
And that's exactly what he wanted.
I don't know where he was for this past year.
But I'm assuming he had some place
that was not in our neighborhood
where someone was feeding him and taking care of him.
And when he knew it was time, he wanted to go home.
He didn't want to have any sort of crappy vet deal.
And I'm a little sad that I put him through that.
But that's the selfishness in our whole gig.
He had a good life.
I don't know why I thought that this may be interesting.
I do know why I thought this may be interesting.
Because hackers in my experience
is another word to describe someone
who is on the quest for enlightenment.
Enlightenment is nothing more than understanding.
The more you understand, the more enlightened you are
on that topic that you have understanding on.
That's what hackers do in my mind.
That's what I do in my mind.
I'm living this life.
I'm interested in it.
I see the life around me.
And I want to understand it.
That's part of me being a hacker.
So I like the idea that what's of interest to hackers?
Any topic is of interest to hackers.
Just try to let us understand it.
A lot of people don't understand.
People get really scared by death.
That is really not a horrible traumatic event.
Although it can be sometimes.
I really enjoyed SIG FLUPS episode of her voice diary
from her time getting some treatment with her issues.
I wish more of us would be able to do that.
This is a halfway step for me.
I wish I could share more deeply my experiences.
Right now my experiences are that the more I try
to explain my own perception,
the less the people I'm explaining it to understand it.
So that's going to wait for another day.
And I'm going to stick to very strict by the books.
This is the event.
These were the steps in the event.
This is what happened.
I know I strayed a little.
Like I said, this is halfway.
I'm babbling at this point.
But who cares?
Somebody probably likes it.
So have a good day guys.
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