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DaveOrion · 10-11-2007, 07:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

Typical feline. And typical dog. This is why I'm a dog person.

I'd never lump all cats into the 'aloof' category or all dogs into the 'faithful companions' group. All the ones I've every known had their own unique personalities; I'm a big fan of both species...

In all fairness to cats....

Quote:

My Cat Saved My Family’s Lives

You read about this sort of thing in Reader’s Digest or in a Chicken Soup book and you wonder: Would my pet react like that? Could my pet save my life? My cat did. She saved the lives of my girlfriend, my daughter, and myself.

Saturday morning I awoke with a lightness and nearly uncomfortable ache in my lungs. Only when I breathed deep did I notice, and I immediately associated the sensation to radical altitude changes.

Years ago I had trekked with friends from Florida to Aspen, Colorado. I ended a driving shift in flat East Colorado, and fell asleep in the back of the car. Upon waking hours later, I found that my chums had driven us farther west and higher up than Denver, the Mile High City. When my cardiovascular system accelerated to waking levels my lungs discovered that the density of the air had changed significantly. Drawing breath, extracting sufficient oxygen, was possible but… different, requiring more work. It made me vertiginous.

Since that 1991 road trip I’ve been to and through Denver and higher altitudes numerous times. Whenever the change is sudden, as it is when I fly in or sleep through the ascension in car, I experience what I’ve come to call “altitude lung.”

On Saturday morning I woke with altitude lung. I thought nothing of it. I had, late the night before, flown home from San Jose, California. I have no idea about the altitude of San Jose, although I didn’t recall experiencing altitude lung when traveling to San Jose from sea level Portland, Oregon. Still, Friday had been a long day of work, several hours traveling by car, several more flying and waiting to fly. The short, one and one half-hour air plane trip had been disproportionately uncomfortable. By the time I arrived home Friday night, I’d been on the go 16 hours, including breathing the atmosphere of two cities and the pressurized air of a 727. My older step-daughter (pseudonymously Mojo) was visiting with her grandparents, so my ten year old (pseudonymously Sassy) occupied my side of our bed. As a consequence—and because Sassy is a kicker—I slept on the couch, which tends to make me clench the muscles throughout my torso in my sleep. All these factors combined easily explained the sensation that I was breathing air of a different density than that to which my lungs were accustomed.

So, nothing there to worry about. I got up, started my day.

Before Sassy and my girlfriend came to retrieve me at the airport, two of our hamsters had passed. One, Tinker, had been making progress in fighting an infection in her cheek. Her passing was sad, but not surprising; we assumed she had succumbed to the illness. The other hamster—our last after the passing of the favorite in August—was 12-18 months old, in the twilight of her life. Although Lili’s death was surprising, it was understandable. Yet their passing in the same evening kept nibbling at the edges of my consciousness, worrying its way toward the fore like an animal gnawing a bone in search of marrow.

I continued to brood on the near simultaneous passing of the hamsters while I used coffee and a mindless video game to try to shake the lethargy from my brain Saturday morning. It was then that my cat, Chloe, saved my family’s lives.

You read about this sort of thing in Reader’s Digest or in a Chicken Soup book and you wonder: Would my pet react like that? Could my pet save my life?

Chloe, my companion of more than ten years, leapt up on my desk as she often does, but her behavior was anything but typical. She incessantly licked the back of her paws as if something there were biting her. Upon inspection, no parasite or even dirt irritated the skin there. More profoundly, Chloe sporadically panted, a quick, desperate type of pant with her tongue jutting forward between tiny teeth. It wasn’t a constant panting, just short bouts, spasmodic. She leapt about my desk, finally diving desperately across my desk to point her face down at the floor—at the floor vent, I would later realize.

Abruptly leaving the room, Chloe jumped about the kids’ bedroom—to the window, into a dresser drawer, behind the bed, and then back through them all again. She was searching for pockets of clean air, we decided later. Holding her in my arms, she was clearly agitated and seemed to be possibly hallucenating as she kept pawing at the air as if a bug were buzzing about before her.

Not knowing what was bothering my cat, the death of the hamsters rising beyond the level of strange coincidence and well into urgent concern, I rushed Chloe to the vet. We were taken in immediately, pushed ahead of a waiting room full of other pets and their companions. The veteranarian went directly to questions regarding poisoning: Could she have gotten into any medications? Any cleaning supplies recently used or left out? Could she have lapped at anti-freeze in a nearby driveway or gutter? What didn’t jive with poisoning were two facts: Her eyes exhibited normal pupilary response; most household poisons and drugs cause animal pupils to either dilate or contract, or to atleast grow sluggish in their response to light. Additionally, the hamsters, safe in their cages, could not have encountered the same poison as Chloe… unless it was airborne.

On cue, Strawberry Blonde called. A mouse was dead.

We have two young girls with a penchant for rodents. Thus we had, until this weekend, four mice and two hamsters in addition to our dog and cats.

Strawberry Blonde suspected carbon monoxide. When I repeated the words the face of the vet standing before me, his hands on my cat, grew taut with concerned recognition. All the symptoms Chloe exhibited were consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning.

In fires, it’s rarely the flames that claim lives. Nearly always the actual cause of death is smoke inhalation, specifically carbon monoxide poisoning. Carbon monoxide deprives the body and brain of oxygen, causing the brain duramatter to swell and press against the interior of the cranium. The smaller the animal, the less brain tissue to enflame and the smaller the space available to accommodate the swelling. Thus, the smaller the animal, the sooner it will die from the effects.

My thoughts immediately flew to 85 lb Sassy who had complained of a headache as I walking out the door with Chloe. I barked at Strawberry Blonde to open all windows in the house, turn on every fan, and get out—echoing what she was already doing.

The vet gave Chloe an anti-inflammatory shot and me his cell number with the instruction to call should her condition fail to improve.

On the way home, I picked up a carbon monoxide detector. The minute we put batteries in the device it began wailing and flashing its “leave the house now” message. This was approximately 40 minutes after every window of the house had been opened. Forty minutes of diffusing the atmosphere of the house and it was still poisonous… What had it been like first thing in the morning, after the heat had run all night, when I awoke with altitude lung?

The heating manifold in our furnace had gone bad, pumping not warm, safe oxygen but lethal, odorless, colorless carbon monoxide through the floor vents in every room of our home. Strawberry Blonde had turned the heater on for the first time this season on Friday morning, while I was in California. The day had warmed in late morning, and the temperature sensing heater had shut down until evening. Had Strawberry Blonde turned it on a day or two earlier, or had Friday’s afternoon weather turned cold, I might have returned home to my family dead. Had the hamsters not died and Chloe not been so insistent in her troubling behavior, it would have been Mojo returning home to find her mother, sister, and me dead. That thought more than anything chills me.

As sad as we are at the passing of our pets, we are just as grateful that, in their deaths, our lives were saved. Ultimately, it was Chloe, my faithful cat, who told us in body language that something was wrong with the air. Her intelligence is astounding, and, if I were not still reeling from the gravity of what might have been, I would likely be more impressed and proud of Chloe’s intelligence and determination. While the death of the two hamsters bothered me both emotionally and intellectually, and we would have noticed the passing of the mice, we might not have made the connection in time to save ourselves. We might have considered a disease passing between the rodents, or a localized airborne killer. Even a sickness in the cats would not necessarily have informed us of the cause.

Chloe’s pantomime, racing between all but completely enclosed areas low to the floor and behind large furniture, jumping to the window, and pointing her head emphatically toward the floor vent, is what, after some time to interpret, told the story. Even her desperate panting was an urgent game of charades. Each time she did it was for so short a duration that the purpose was obviously not to cool her down or bring in fresh air.

Chloe has completely recovered, returning to her normal behaviors. Sassy’s headache dissipated shortly after she was moved outside and then to her father’s house for the day. Neither Strawberry Blonde nor I continue to exhibit any symptoms of exposure to the toxic gas. And, three mice and our other animals all seem to be doing well, following their normal routines of running, jumping, stalking, or barking.

http://www.iampariah.com/blog/2006/0...familys-lives/