How not to get a good night’s sleep?

Live with a cat who’s currently in heat…

Because of the Leukemia, we have been unable to get Olive spayed. The vet is worried that her immune system won’t be able to recover from such an invasive surgery and that she’ll die. In fact, this past week when we took her in to try again, they couldn’t even draw blood because her blood pressure was so low. We are headed back later this week for another attempt because I’m honestly not sure how to live with a cat in heat.

She cries, hysterically, for long periods of time, but only at night. She’s usually perfectly fine until the sun goes down. Last night the crying started around 9pm, but was intermittent enough that we were able to fall asleep when we went to be at 11pm. At least until a second voice joined that crying at 3:30am. Her crying seemed a lot more bearable when compared to the gutteral male howl coming from outside. I peeked out the window and sure enough, there was not one, but two male cats sitting on our front porch, one of which was basically howling to save his life. The next door neighbor woke up and came out on her porch which scared them off momentarily.

Not sure what else to do, we locked Olive in the bedroom with us so that she couldn’t sit directly by the front door, rubbing her female sent all over, and driving every male cat in the neighborhood crazy. She chose instead, to sit in the bedroom window and warble, still keeping us awake and still convincing one of the male cats to sit on the back porch underneath our bedroom window.

Alex headed outside with a bowl of water and dumped it on him to get him to run away which appears to have worked for the rest of the night since we were finally able to get back to sleep around 5am.

Now what though?

We can’t spend almost two hours chasing away neighborhood cats every night and I feel bad for our neighbors, because obviously we aren’t the only ones being woken up.

Anyone have suggestions?