I have a cat named Isabel and I love her very much. She is a Calico cat that my granddaughter found at the UCO football field over two years ago. Something is wrong with her this week however and the vet can't figure it out. Something has been wrong for over three weeks and still no real improvement. My youngest daughter's two year old cat almost died last month from some weird kidney infection. She lived however and is now doing just fine. People think that cats and dogs are tough and can take care of themselves. They are not tough; they are really quite fragile creatures that can succumb to some terrible disease or injury or illness within a very short length of time. I don't really have a point to make with this except that it helps me to talk about it. You get so caught up in the lives of these little beings and really they don't get to stay around in your life for all that long a time. You think, oh fourteen years is a long time to have a pet (I had a cat named Kitty that recently died at age fourteen), but when the animal has been your best friend for that long and then he just suddenly isn't there anymore, something in you dies too. Or maybe this is true only with certain people, maybe not everyone gets so attached to their pets. Anyway, for me it has certainly been true and will continue to be so. I guess our pets are friends we are blessed with for only a short while, that they are supposed to come in and out of our lives like a flash of beautiful, bright sunlight. Most assuredly, we are forever enriched from having known them.