Patrick Cleary

And so I said, OK, well, I'll take in your cat.

And she also had a little dog.

And I took care of them for a couple of weeks.

And then when she got herself established, she came back and she said, well, I can take the dog.

But even though my husband's now in prison, he got me pregnant.

And I can't clean a cat box because of toxoplasmosis.

Pregnant women aren't supposed to clean out cat boxes.

And so what I didn't tell her was that I wasn't supposed to be cleaning cat boxes either because I had just been diagnosed with HIV and toxoplasmosis is really bad for people with HIV as well.

But she said Rita was a 17-year-old cat.

She wasn't going to live for very much longer.

And at the time, I felt like I might not live very much longer either because my CD4 count wasn't doing so well.

And because I'm really a drama queen, I figured we would just sit on the couch.

The two of us wasting away.

And they'd find us because we had died exactly at the same time.

So I figured a 17-year-old cat, a guy who's probably going to perish, we're probably made for one another.

Now, Rita was declawed.

The woman who had her before me didn't declaw her.

The woman before her had declawed the cat.

But Rita also liked to pretend that she was scratching the furniture, and she'd look at me.

And because I'm a good guy, I'd say, stop that.