My beloved Annie is ailing.

The cat ate a quarter of a can of food today. It's not much but so far she has kept it down so it's an improvement. I pause while I write this sentence to walk the house and check to see that she hasn't yakked up her last meal and made a liar out of me.

I pass her in the front hallway near the front room of my parents' house she has claimed as hers. She is gracious enough to share it with my father, who still thinks it's his office. (Annie and I are camped with my parents while my new townhome is being built.)

The fact that she's up and around cheers me. The other fact that I can find no cat yak anywhere thrills me. It's not the cleanup I mind. In an odd way that makes me feel paternal just like when I wipe her runny nose. At the rate I'm going she's the closest thing I'll ever have to a child. Being a daddy means cleaning his kiddy's (or kitty's) messes.

It's important that she doesn't throw up her food because otherwise she might be starve to death.

She's scared me before. She got a terrible hairball when we lived in Lexington once. Her digestive system completely clogged. It must have hurt like hell. She'd would start yowling in feline screams of pain before contractions that wracked her whole body sent everything inside back up through her mouth. (While Annie's well-being was my first concern, I will admit to being grateful for having hardwood floors easier to clean than carpet.)

While the cat's health has worried me before, this is the first time it has alarmed a vet.

The appointment was for routine and, sorry to say, three months overdue vaccinations. Annie's hatred of getting into the car (developed because her dingbat owner only took her to the vet where they poked, prodded and stuck her with needles) has in turn conditioned her dingbat owner to hate putting her through the ordeal.

So I put it off even though Annie began to "eject" her food on a semi-regular basis. It didn't seen to bother her. She didn't act sick and she'd eat more later. In the last month or so I did notice that she was bonier than usual. She's always been a small cat, hence my always calling her "The Little Pretty Kitty."

"How's the little pretty kitty doing?" I'm constantly asking her. "How'd you get to be so pretty?" I look at her as if awaiting an answer. She looks at me like I'm an idiot for expecting one. Great judge of character, she.

Now my pretty kitty is too little: Six-point-one pounds. Then the vet felt a "palpable thyroid gland" and heard a heart murmur. And just for fun, the herpes virus plaguing her sinuses for her whole life had sparked a bacterial infection just that morning. She looked and sounded scared, skinny and sick.

I was beginning to feel two of the three and, despite my recent disciplined working out, skinny wasn't one.

The vet, Heidi Goss, wanted to do tests. Blood test. Urine test. $170 worth of tests. Does she have thyroid disease, as Goss suspects? Kidney disease? Liver problems? Do the tests, I say. How are they going to get Annie to pee for them, I wonder. They try to squeeze it out of her, I'm told. If that doesn't work, they stick a needle in her and withdraw it that way -- for $21 more of course. Lucky for my wallet and for Annie's relative comfort, they're able to get their cat pee freshly squeezed.

A few ounces of urine and $250 lighter, Annie and I leave the vet with a promise that she will call later in the day with the test results. We also leave with pills I have to give the cat for the sinus problem. Because I haven't annoyed her enough, every day for the next two weeks I get to forcibly pry Annie's mouth open and jam my finger inside to push pills so far down her throat she has no choice but to swallow them.

My little pretty kitty.

Annie's always been somewhat sickly. When I adopted her in Connecticut back in late 1995, she was living at a vet's office receiving treatment for the herpes virus in her sinuses that had almost killed her as a kitten. To get her to eat, they had to feed her by hand. She eventually learned to eat out of a bowl like cats in the wild do but, even now, more than nine years later, she still greatly prefers it if I pick the food out of the bowl by hand so she can eat it out of my palm.

I used to do it occasionally to spoil her. Now I do it several times a day trying to save her life from that rarest of weight problems: not enough.

Whether she recovers, it has made me aware of her mortality. If not this time, someday she will get sick and never get well. Someday the only treatment will be to take her to the vet for the shot that won't save her life but will end it. Someday I will kiss her on top of her head one last time and tell her how glad I am that she lives with me and hold her as she goes to sleep forever.

I don't want her to die. She's a good cat. To me, anyway. She runs and hides from strangers and from rainstorms and, like any cat worth its feline esteem, she knows her name but answers to it only if she feels like it. But even as I dragged her out from under my father's desk for her vet visit and she knew something unfun was afoot, she dug her claws into the carpet, not into me. When I shove my fingers down her throat to deposit pills inside her in an act that she cannot possibly fathom as beneficial to her, she doesn't turn on me then. In her whole life she has never deliberatly done anything to hurt anybody. Some cats are vindictive but not Annie. No peeing or pooping outside the litter box to make a point. No destructive scratching to get back at me for some misdeed on my part, real or imagined, like stuffing pills down her throat.

As poorly as it might reflect on me, Annie is my best friend. True, she won't answer my e-mails and she can't always even be bothered to listen when I talk to her. But she's been there through thick and thin, sickness and health, heat and cold and we agree that heat is better. She's come with me from Connecticut to North Carolina to Florida to Kentucky (two places there: Lexington and suburban Cincinnati) and back to Florida -- hating the car ride every time but always forgiving me when we get to the next place and adapting to her new home in some cases better than I do. (On long car rides I have learned that if I let her out of the pet carrier she will eventually settle down and go to sleep on my lap whereas if I leave her in the carrier she can whine for nine hours straight.)

Annie sleeps under a footrest in the room the rest of us call Dad's office. The footrest is an old one, with a wooden base and a pad resting on top. The space underneath makes a perfect kitty cave. Another sign of illness is the fact that she spends a lot of her time under shelter. To cats, an illness is something attacking them that they can't see. Their instinct tells them to hide.

I go lie prone on the floor next to the footrest and look in at her. I reach in with my hand to hold it against her. I don't say much. She doesn't look like she's in the mood for conversation. Nothing I could say could make her understand what I'd like her to know any better than a gentle touch of a hand:

"Dear Annie. You're wonderful. I'm grateful for the time we've had. And whatever time we have left."

UPDATE! She has rallied! It took a little while and a lot of hand feeding but Annie is doing much better. She runs around now, she's gained weight and you can tell she is a much happier cat. So am I.

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