Thinking About Quest – Thoughts from July 16, 2023

I’ve become the guy who brings down the room by talking about Quest going blind. I can’t really talk about anything else because it’s the only thing on my mind. She just turned thirteen years old and I don’t know if she’s going to make it to fourteen. I tell people her age and they understand why she’s having problems. We have a skewed view of how long cats live because we had cats that lived to eighteen and twenty-one years of age. When Blaze had to be put to sleep, we knew Quest might not make it much longer. She made it past introducing Scout and the birth of six kittens. Scout and three of the kittens (now cats) are still with us. They are close to being two years old. Quest survived years past Blaze, but it never seems like enough when the end becomes inevitable. She is blind. We can’t change that. We are here for her as much as we can be.

I said I can’t think of anything but Quest, but I’m going to try. On the nerdy side, I bought two 8 TB hard drives to add more storage to my NAS (Network Attached Storage). I finally figured out how to add the drives and expand the storage. It only saw the original 4 TB of space when I put them in. I finished expanding one drive, but I have to take the other drive out and put it back to expand it. Each part of this process takes about a day to complete so I’m on about day four. These nerdy problems take time. The greatest thing this teaches me is patience. My biggest motivation is knowing what it’s like to lose years of information because of a bad backup. I never want to experience that again.

Last night as I was on the floor taking out one drive and putting it back in, Quest climbed on top of my legs and lied down. I really wished I could let her stay there. I took her picture. The cloudiness of her eyes was truly apparent. I hadn’t even gotten out of my work clothes. She followed the sound of my voice as I got ready for bed. When I got in bed, she was right beside the bed on the floor. I tried to pat the side of the bed to encourage her to jump up, but she never did. I didn’t want to put her in the bed because I didn’t know if she could judge the distance to the floor. She eventually walked away. I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and she was on top of the toilet lid. It encouraged me to see she could jump up there. As usual, the other maniacs came in with me and I had to keep them from being nasty to Quest. I tell them their aunt is blind so quit being nasty, but they don’t listen because I don’t know how to say it in cat.

We all knew I couldn’t go that long without talking about Quest. She’s even part of my nerdy stories. She’s part of our lives and a member of our family. Anyone who has ever had a pet can relate to seeing that pet decline in old age. A thirteen year old cat is about sixty-eight human years. As I get older, sixty-eight doesn’t seem that old. My mom died when she was about that age and my dad was even younger when he died. I want Quest to be around longer, but I don’t want her to suffer. We might be getting close to that stage as much as I don’t want to admit it. I think I’m done writing for today, but I’ll never stop thinking about Quest.