I've called my little cat Gaither "Monkey Cat" since he was a kitten, shortly after my son and I adopted him and his slightly older cousin, Sage. He not only looks like a funny little monkey, but his antics are endearingly funny. Gaither loves to squeeze into tight places. Sure, many cats love to play in boxes, but no one else in my six-cat household can squeeze into a shoe box.

Gaither doesn't confine his play to boxes.

He also loves kitchen cabinets and drawers. Just before we moved from California I panicked one evening because I couldn't find Gaither anywhere. I had looked in every room in the house, and he was nowhere to be found. I was able to eliminate all the bedrooms, and the living room, and all the drawers and cabinets in the kitchen. I was just about ready to call our neighbors, when I remembered the cabinet hidden back and above our large refrigerator. It is so far back on the wall that I never use it because couldn't possibly reach it without a step-stool. I called my son and he opened the door to the cabinet. Sure enough, there was Gaither, blissfully enjoying a nap in the dark.

Now that we're in our new home in GA, it didn't take long for Monkey Cat to find the cabinet above the refrigerator. The cabinets here are much more convenient as they have knobs. Such is the luck of Monkey Cat.

 My son and I adopted Gaither and his cousin, Sage in 2013 at an adoption day event by a rescue group called ARK, (Angels Rescuing Kritters) in a Petco store in Auburn, CA.  The adoption papers for Gaither show that his original name was Faith, and it was changed after the foster took little Faith to be spayed, and discovered that she was really a he. Gaither is such an unusual name that I looked it up on the Internet and found that Gaither means "goat herder."  I found it fitting as my son often refers to our Billy as "Goat," so we didn't subject Gaither to yet another name change.

It wasn't long after they were adopted that the two kittens came down with chlamydophila (a common cause of feline conjunctivitis, also known as pinkeye), technically a bacterial  upper respiratory infection. It rapidly spread to the adult cats, and there ensued a month of delivering various sized doses of an antibiotic to six cats twice a day.

Although chlamydophila could technically be called a zoonotic disease, the NCBI found so few authenticated cases that it concluded "While there is evidence that C. felis may occasionally cause keratoconjunctivitis in humans, there is little evidence to suggest it can cause serious systemic disease or pneumonia."  I had pinkeye as a child, and rather than take a chance, I wore latex gloves while caring for the cats' eyes, scrubbed my hands and arms afterward, and used cleansing eyedrops twice a day. I'm glad to say I didn't get pinkeye.

As one might suspect, conjunctivitis is more common in catteries, animal shelters, and multiple-cat households, so we were destined to become a hospital ward as soon as we brought our kittens home.

We suspect that the kittens may have already had the start of conjunctivitis when we adopted them. Although there is a vaccine for it, according to this article, The American Association of Feline Practitioners also does not recommend routine use of the chlamydophila vaccine, according to the above-cited article. I do recall the adoption papers specifically mentioning that one vaccine had not been given to the kittens. 

Gaither was my kitten, and it broke my heart to see him sick. One of the side effects of  conjunctivitis is that sometimes, the cats shed their "eyebrows" above their eyes. Gaither is two years old now and has only a third of those original beautiful white hairs remaining. 

The conjunctivitis had another side effect, in that after the infection was gone, Gaither's eyes developed a sort of "sinister" look at times, which led to his nickname, Monkey Cat. They sometimes look  just like he's about to stir up some trouble (and he usually is).