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| 9-20-2004 Am, not feeling so good. |
In 2005, two things stand out amid the wreckage of memory. First of all, I became obsessed with the idea that I was about to loose my job. The crazy Governor was cutting the budget, and I felt vulnerable. Among the ideas I had for withstanding the uncertainty was to plead with my unit head for a more stable form of appointment. How long had I been a ‘visiting lecturer’, after all? Part of my idea about how the levers of the world worked, at least university-style, was to have a second offer in hand to use for bargaining purposes. As luck would have it, another opportunity in my field arose and I set about applying. I had a good set of references, so I got an interview. This meant a plane ride to Ohio. Now that Del was in my life, and seeing as how Del was unemployed, I had a cat sitter at hand.
Amethyst took this opportunity to become truly alarmingly
sick. This time, it had nothing to do with vomiting. All of a sudden, she could
not walk. I was laying on my pallet, a mattress I had had custom made which I
left on the floor without the benefit of box springs, the green blanket pulled
up, just waking up from an afternoon nap, looking into the afternoon light, my
eyes seeking Amethyst. Here she comes. Not walking, but crawling, towards the
bed. Just like that. No balance. It was very much like the drunken cat we had seen
in the run up to the road trip. Now, however, there was no obvious reason. The
mind races in these situations. It’s not just me. Look at the Internet and type
in anything you can think of that might have gone wrong with your pet. You will
find page after page on multitudinous sites expressing the racing mind, sinking
spirits, heartbreaking questions, and plenty of advice. I was on the phone to
the vet. What can this be? The magnitude was beyond my experience, and the
outcome seemed potentially terrible. Spinal injury? How? Poison? Well, what?
Amethyst, on the bed, is lolling her head around, trying to get a look at me,
but not really able to get the muscles together to keep a position. She’ll eat
and drink, but you have to do it all by hand. The vets can’t do anything over
the phone, of course. For some reason, I don’t trust them. The closest thing I
can find that resembles her symptoms is on a canine site: geriatric vestibular
syndrome. All of a sudden, your dog can’t stand up. It lolls its head around. It
might vomit because it has lost balance. At last, we’re getting somewhere.
Amethyst is not vomiting, for once. Loss of balance was not something that
nauseated her. Maybe cats don’t balance the way that dogs and humans do. Maybe,
in the differences between us as beings, our responses to various situations
suit our constitutions. Some people toss their cookies on the roller coaster.
Amethyst was a great rider in the car, and her sensitive stomach was not upset
by not knowing which way was up. Maybe, though, she knew which way was up.
Maybe she just couldn’t get her muscles to obey. That was the behavioral
presentation: I had a cat that had no muscular control. It was not that she
wasn’t trying. Making for the cat box, there was no mistaking the intention. You
had to pick her up and complete the trip. When did I have to be in Ohio? What
day was my flight?
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| Del in my bed, with Thyst |
Some of the info on geriatric vestibular syndrome was
frightening. Sometimes afflicted animals do not recover. Euthanasia was
recommended for these animals. Among the potential causes of the syndrome:
infection of the ear, brain trauma, and cancer. An ear infection I could see
treating with antibiotics, but the other items sounded deadly. I could imagine
an expensive course of treatment ending up with euthanasia. Now we look over at
the cat, to see that beautiful, charming animal that has by now totally infused
life as we know it, to try to determine the level of suffering. For the life of
me, though, I had seen more evidence of suffering, more pitiful vocal
expressions of suffering, in the moments just before the hacking up of a
hairball. Perhaps the vestibular whatever it is has robbed the cat of her
voice. Still, I’m just not detecting suffering from this animal. Am I going to
euthanize Amethyst just because I have to carry her to the cat box? Somewhere, on some site’s discussion, I ran
across the comforting term “idiopathic.” There it is: ‘feline idiopathic
vestibular syndrome’. Idiopathic = “we don’t know what causes it.” Might last a week, might last two months,
might be something serious. Clearly, this was a case for Christian Science.
Let’s have the power of positive thinking.
I went to Ohio. I remember meeting many lovely people,
taught a good class, made some good music. In the middle of one class that I
was playing for as an audition, a dancer went down, injured. I sat at the piano
in the chaotic silence looking out with concern at the crying dancer and those
administering first aid. Was there more I could do? Everything is part of the
audition process. Later, taking a walking tour of the campus, Spring just
beginning to soften the temperature, a faculty member tells of her husband’s
medical crises. I blurt out that my cat has some weird disease, and that I’m
very worried about it.
Del stayed over at my apartment in Champaign in my absence
and nursed Ammy. On the phone, Del says ‘Amethyst is mostly the same, maybe a
bit better’. I can pin my hopes to ‘a bit better’. I didn’t get the job, so we didn’t move to
Ohio. Amethyst recovered. She lived on to die on another early morning, several
human living spaces down the stream of time. Is it my imagination, working on
the memories, trying to make things add up to something? I really do think that
after each crisis, there was a little less spirit in Amethyst. She had so much
‘fire’, to snatch a single word from Shelley’s poetic phrase ‘grace of fire’,
that her aging process moved forward imperceptibly. She quit jumping up on
anything over her floor level by one and a half feet. At first one got the impression
that she could, but wouldn’t. Then, one could see that she couldn’t when she
tried. At what point did I come to hate the long walks that I used to love as a
young man? I am poised now between won’t and can’t. Cats seem blessed because
they don’t manifest the modals should, could, or may.
