Nobody is quite sure of Lucy The Jungle Cat's actual birthday. I'm sure she knows, but she isn't telling. But it was somewhere around this date in the year 2005, and so 1 October has always been treated as her Official Date.

A year ago she became old enough to vote, or would have been had she not held hoominz in general and politicians in particular in such disdain. Today she is 19. I'm not sure how old that is in human years since a lot of the charts stop counting at 18, which they regard as being 88. Which could mean that she just reached that point and stopped aging. Actually that's possible because I can't really tell that much difference between her as she is now, and her as she was a year ago.

Of course, I can certainly tell a difference between the way she is now and the way she was when she first made an appearance in my galleries in 2011, including her definitive portrait in my 2011 PAD gallery. (110226_183806_15628 El Gato (Sat 26 Feb 11).)

Her body is basically trashed. She's diabetic, requiring insulin shots twice daily. According to my vet, cats who become diabetic either recover from it quickly or, if it becomes chronic, usually have at best 2 years to live. She's lived with the condition for at least 8 years. She has thyroid imbalance issues, necessitating daily medicine. She has rheumatism and arthritis, which requires pain relief powder from a capsule being added to her food each day, plus monthly shots. In August 2023 she pulled an Achilles tendon in one of her back legs. After 500 bucks worth of radiology it was determined that it wasn't torn, so surgery wouldn't be recommended (since she may not survive it anyway) and it would be better to just let it heal... which it never really did so she often walks with the lower part of one back leg horizontal and doesn't so much walk as shuffle, though thankfully not seemingly painfully. (See also, the pain relief meds mentioned above.) She still has movement in the back leg, but often just... doesn't use it.

She can climb sets of stairs; not quickly, but she can do it, and can climb down stairs to the garage just to be a pain in the backside. Her days of jumping onto beds and chairs and couches (much less over fences) are, however, long past.

She can't always squat in the litter box fully, meaning that there needs to be puppy training pads out the front of it to catch the overflow, though this is (especially recently) a "comes and goes" issue.

She did still have to have one (probably) last surgery last October because of a combination of dental decay and a condition called tooth reabsorption, where cats of a certain age start reabsorbing their teeth into their jaw. (At a cost of 2.5 grand, so elderly cats do not come cheap.) I say "one last" because surgery is as risky as hell on an 18 year old cat (and was only done because the quality of life alternative would have been worse), but anesthetising a 19 year old cat would be like playing Russian Roulette with most of the chambers filled.

Her eyesight is going; on her way out to the pool this week to do her laps (the kind with her tongue, not her legs, though every time she falls into the pool she does manage to swim out before complaining loudly that "grabbity" tricked her), she walked past a water dragon (a lizard the size of a small kitten) and didn't see it. When it's fuud time, I need to move her dinner bowl around in the air so that she can pick up on its movement and follow it to its landing spot.

For a time she was quite grumpy and seemingly senile, but the grumpiness seems to have abated somewhat since the dental operation. The senility, I'm not so sure about because she will tend to vocalise about nothing in particular at random times. Unfortunately some of those random times are at 2 in the morning. A sign of pain? I doubt it, because when I go to her and ask her what's wrong, she will often stare blankly at me as if to say "What? I have no idea what you're talking about, I was just sitting here. I didn't hear anything."

According to Purina Pet Food's web page:
"What is the average cat's life expectancy?

The true answer is that it depends, but indoor cats usually live longer than outdoor cats. The average indoor cat lifespan is 16 to 18 years and some even reach (or pass) the venerable age of 20."

"Ob course, ah iz not an ABERAGE kitteah!"

The Jungle Cat lives a relatively quiet life now. In the morning she will demand some "breafass", and do her "laps" of the pool (preferably without falling in). If the weather is fine, she'll spend some time dozing in the warmth of the sun, as we see here. Once her thermostat reaches its limit she'll come and lay in the bed behind my desk and just snore loudly in between periodic demands for attention. She prefers having lunch with meds to dinner these days, and since I mostly work from home that can be provided. Dinner treats like bits of steak or salmon from the hoomin plates are savoured. She's old and creaky, but she's still "there" and still seems to be getting some enjoyment out of life.

The odds of there being a 20th birthday shot? While you should never take anything for granted in life, I would still say... better than average.