So, I’ve posted a bunch of pictures on the blog of Patacon, but I never really got around to talking about Patacon. I should do that.

Patacon, like a lot of the cats we’ve had – all of the cats we’ve had, really (including our other cat, Mason) – was a rescue. However, her story was a bit more adventurous.

She came into the family’s life when my sister was on a college work-study trip in Ecuador – there she and the other students working on habitat restoration for turtles found Patacon as a kitten on the street. Her mother was dead and they couldn’t find the rest of her litter. There Gwyn and the rest of the volunteers nursed her to health, and Gwyn made arrangements to bring her back to the US, where Patacon took residence with us. Gwyn’s degree program would later involve her spending some time in Canada, along with frequent trips for fieldwork, so having her with us provided stability both geographically and in terms of her people.

Here she particularly became attached to one of our older cats – Truman.

Truman was always kind of stand-offish, though he did have a cuddly side (particularly with me) – so as Patacon warmed up to Truman, she also warmed up to me – with the two of them spending some significant time in my room. While we’ve had cats for quite some time, Patacon and Truman had both adopted me as their human (in Truman’s case from the day we got him). This also meant that when Truman passed, Patacon helped me through it.

Over time, Patacon became particularly attached to me – to the point that after I got a job after the pandemic that took me out of the house, she became positively despondent. To make up for this, because we watched Twitch streams together a lot, I would put on a Twitch Stream when I left the house – usually either Giant Bomb Infinite, or later one of the Game Center CX bootleg streams or the European Speedrunner Assembly channel, along with any charity marathons that were on at the time.

She also had her sock – it was a little black sock that we’d originally tied a rattly mouse inside, but eventually the mouse broke, and kinda slipped out of the sock, so then it was just a sock with a knot in it. She’d wander around the house with it and would meow when she had her sock and nobody was around to give her attention – and we’d make fun of her because frequently we were just a room a way – or even within clear line of sight. I sadly don’t have any pictures of this – but think of it like the Little Pink Sock from Mutts.

Over the past few years, while she’d gotten older as a cat, she was still fairly rambunctious – with the increased activity on my dresser from my getting a CPAP, she found this gave her a license to start walking around on my dresser again – indeed, on the Friday before she passed, I had noticed that the dimmer on my alarm clock had been repeatedly hit – likely by Patacon walking on my dresser.

When we adopted another cat after Truman passed – Mason – the two kind of got along. They weren’t as cuddly as Truman and Patacon were, but Mason’s background was different. He came out of a home that horded cats, so he was very skittish. He still hasn’t exactly gotten around to getting to know me yet for similar reasons – combined with my not working remote.

When I got home from an evening meetup, my Mom let me know that Patacon had not been drinking water, and hadn’t eaten much – we also noticed that she was spasming. We took her to a local Veterinary ER, where they did an examination and found fluid accumulating between her lungs. They said that they were going to draw out the fluid and run tests, and kept her overnight and sent us home. They gave 3 possibilities for the cause – infection, heart failure, or cancer. We put our hopes on an infection that could be treated with antibiotics.

The next day, after I recorded the Bubblegum Crisis podcast episode (which will be going up later this month) – to maintain a degree of normalcy – we checked in with the ER, and learned that it was cancer. Patacon had cancer in her kidneys and liver. We weren’t going to even have any time for hospice care at home. So, we went to the ER, and said our goodbyes. Before Patacon passed, I brought out my phone, and she and I watched the GameCenter CX Bootleg Twitch channel before she went to sleep for the last time.

We have a spot in our backyard where we’ve buried some of our past pets – we buried her there – and it seems appropriate that where we buried her ended up developing a sunspot. She’d like that.

EDIT: Quick note – I’ve recorded my WIP videos for Xenoblade Chronicles weeks in advance – if she shows up in one of those, that’s why.