Teach an old cat new tricks : Part 1

Seventeen in cat years is like ninety-something in human terms. And of course I was concerned about Her Imperial-but-Geriatric Fluffiness being locked in a cage in a dark cargo hold for 30 hours. But I couldn't leave her behind. 
She's been in the family longer than my daughter.

And I'd already had to give my dog away. 
(Still can't even type that without crying).

Clearly because I wasn't already angst-riddled enough, one of my caring and supportive friends heaped a few more heebies on my jeebies by casually querying, "Aren't you sort of worried that there'll be a dead cat in the carrier when you get to London?"
Well, I am now!

So all the way from Tullamarine to Heathrow I fretted. Every time we hit turbulence, I dissolved into champagne-enhanced tears in my fabulously comfortable company-paid-for-it business class seat.

But she made it.
We both did.


It's only recently that we've begun to have a near-terminal-velocity bumpy ride.
She's killing me.
Slowly.

Night yowling.
Apparently it's a thing.
She's not sick.
She's not hungry.
She's not cold.
She had a hysterectomy 17 years ago, so it's not about calling the boys.
She's not even lonely.

She's just losing her marbles.
Loudly.
At regular intervals between midnight and 5:00am the bitch-cat-from-hell
finds her way into our midst and begins summoning her demon buddies for the ritual slaughtering of all humans in residence. 
It's spine chilling.

I tried talking nicely to her.
I tried shouting at her.
I tried throwing everything from my bedside table at the wall.
No change.

So I switched to a more pro-active approach and left the radio on upstairs where she sleeps. BBC 2.  Surely that would either bore her to sleep or engage her with its interesting interviews in soothing voices.
And it worked for one night. 
Maybe two.

Next I amped up the love, and left a night light on for her as well. 
So far so good.
Some time between 2:00 and 3:00am, she does start to wind up the howlelujah, but then like a baby crying itself to sleep, she self-soothes.
Eventually.

I think she'd probably prefer that I left the TV on, but I fear the inevitable next step would be the expectation for me to stay up all night to explain the bits she missed while she was asleep.

It's a slippery slope.

...the mid-night hamster wheel

Scientists have known for a long time that daily rhythms are driven by some kind of clock in our bodies. But they didn’t work out exactly where it was until the middle of the 20^th century. They found this out when they did surgery on hamsters. They took out a tiny part of the brain of hamsters called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). After this, the hamsters totally lost their rhythm – and not just on the hamster wheel. It used to be easy to predict when the hamsters would run on a wheel. But after they lost the SCN, they ran at any and all times of the day and night. That was the first big step in understanding.

http://www.sleephealthfoundation.org.au/files/pdfs/body-clock.pdf  
 

How’s your suprachiasmatic clock? Mine is way out of synch. I firmly believe its regular settings were totally lost at about the same time that my short-term memory disappeared into the post-menopausal-black-hole. If scientists were to remove any tiny part of my brain, any tiny part at all — left or right, frontal or back — I’m convinced they’d find it riddled with even tinier holes through which my hamster rhythm has been gradually leaking away.

After all my late night farnarkling routines have been thoroughly exhausted, you know how it goes —tidy/ablute /brush/check Facebook/put dogs out/ check emails/let dogs back in/charge phone/check blog/ turn off computer/find book— and I finally squeeze into the piece of the bed left for me by the dogs (which is always always the bit where there is plenty of doona cover but not one square inch of warm fluffy doona) it isn’t long before I fall asleep. Often with the light still on and a book on my face.

At some stage during the night, every night, no matter how many cups of coffee, glasses of pinot gris or life–sustaining minutes of exercise in the fresh air preceded it, I will wake. But here’s the thing, I wake at 2:22, 3:33 or 4:44. What’s with that? Comedic cosmic compensation? Or is my body clock trying to tell me something?

I don’t understand.