Sextus

Our neighbourhood always has a couple of stray (or semi-stray) cats wandering around. When we first moved in, back in the summer of '03, one of them was a grey male. He was a very friendly cat, even permitting our daughters - who at the time were eight and five - to pet him. As autumn drew past, however, we noticed that he was sneezing a lot, so my wife scooped him up one day and took him to the vet. There didn't seem to be anything wrong, though, so we assumed it was just allergies.


And, since it was starting to cool off at night, we let him move in with us. Officially his name is Sextus, but because of the allergies he's also known as Sneezlepuss, or Snarflepuss, or even The Incredible Sneezing Cat. The vet's estimate at the time was that he was seven to nine years old, thus making him around 14 or 15 now. He's gotten a little hard of hearing over the last couple years, and he seems to have problems with arthritis - bumping his right foreleg in particular can lead to a nip.


And then I noticed the other day that his pupils were both fully dilated - almost perfect circles, with just a thin rim of iris visible around them. And it wasn't particularly dark in that room. So I carried him into the bedroom, which was better lighted, and his pupils didn't change. Even when he looked directly at the lamp. Wife took him to the vet yesterday, and as we suspected, he's now blind. So he spends most of his time in the upstairs loo, where he doesn't have far to go to find his supper dish and litter box, though of course we take him out to spend some quality time with us each day.