Tigger is no longer with us but his memory will always be here. I was thinking about Tigger today and how we almost lost him due to a new food that was so good but so bad. Let us get into the way-back machine and travel back to Thursday, March 22, 2007. Wait…No! Let’s go back about a week or so before that.

This is Tigger with his buddy Alex taken shortly before the indecent, Feb 24, 2007

Princess, Tigger, Abbey and Flash, Jan 28, 2007

I got a coupon for a free bag of a new cat food called The Good Life Recipe. This was back when I thought Iams was a relatively healthy cat food and that is what our cats were eating. This new food was like giving popcorn to a seagull. They loved it and ate like there was no tomorrow.

Even though I wasn’t as knowledgeable about cat food then as I am now, I knew it was too good to be good for them. I figured I would let them finish the bag. Later I would buy the small bags of it and give them out like kitty treats. It worked and it was way cheaper than real kitty treats.

Now, getting back to the story. Rose and I had met our mortgage broker after work and then had a late dinner at a Mexican restaurant on the way home. We both had our own cars so when we left I followed Rose home. I was delayed in traffic and when I got home I saw Rose’s car in the driveway with the lights on, the engine running and the driver’s door open but there was nobody in sight.

I don’t know what was going through my head at the time but I would imagine it was nothing good. Inside, Rose was frantic. Tigger was having trouble breathing and we needed to get him to a vet right away. Our kids, Chris and Nick, were just about to bring him to the vet but they didn’t know where to go so they called Rose shortly before she got home.

We didn’t know where to go either. This was before we could open our phones and ask Google. Rose drove and I held Tigger on my lap. He was really struggling to get air and I worried we would lose him.  Rose was even more worried than I because she kept repeating that he was going to die.

She called her sister, Felice, who knew of an after hours vet in Port Richey but that was too far. We headed that way anyway and I tried calling information to see if I could find one closer. At that time, information had transitioned from a real person to a worthless robot that was no help at all so we made the trip to Port Richey.

They did several tests and found that Tigger had a large blockage in his esophagus so they put a long instrument down his throat and pushed it into his stomach. We will never know for sure what that blockage was, but since he was found at the food bowl, I’m sure he ate that new food so fast that it got caught in his airway. At $500, that was the most expensive free bag of cat food in history.

Nowadays I feed them a much higher quality dry cat food that they like but not enough to binge eat it. I would get rid of it completely if not for Chris’s stubbornness about eating wet food.

So that’s Tigger’s story. I like reminiscing. I think soon I will write about how we came to adopt him and his brother, Flash.