Streak Gets Sick
April, 1995
It seems that
my little nine month old kitty-warrior's leukemia has finally caught up
with her. Sometime last week, she just stopped eating. I don't know
when, because she's always been a terribly fussy eater, and even when
she has eaten, she hasn't eaten much. But, sometime last week, the
amount of food she was leaving was roughly equal to the amount I'd
given her. Worse still, she even quit trying to bury it.
It was also hard to tell just when she started feeling sick, because she never once complained to me. Ultimately, that was the giveaway, because for the first time since I adopted her, she quit complaining all together. She also called a moratorium on her apartment demolition project - a development which I view with considerable ambivalence.
The fact of the matter is that this is all an excuse, and I'm approximately the worst kitty-mom that ever lived. I mean, my cat has always been the picture of frail feline femininity, but by this Monday, she'd transformed herself into a wheezing bag of fur and bones, and I'd only just now noticed.
So, I took her to the vet. To her credit, she still had enough love, and kitty spirit to pee all over the leather upholstery in my car, but that was really about all she could muster.
The vet kept her overnight, did some x-rays, and engaged me in some incredibly depressing phone conversations, which ultimately boiled down to a single suggestion that from here on out, I should probably buy her cat food one can at a time. She has an inoperable tumor, which they say is of a type that's typical of cats suffering from feline leukemia virus, and it's only a matter of time before she has to be put down. Probably a very short matter of time.
Still, they decided to try medicating her to see if she can get a week or two more, so we have a chance to say good-bye to each other. So, they sent me home with a slightly better looking cat, and a couple of kitty prescriptions: one for an antibiotic, and one for prednisone. There seemed like a lot of pills in both of those bottles, certainly more of both than any doctor has ever given me, but I assumed that I was supposed to keep feeding them to her twice a day until either the supply of pills or her will to live gives out. It turns out that this is a rather rash assumption, which may take some explaining.
I'd always thought that the most terrifying phrase in the world that I could think of was "Cat with opposable digits." The possibilities are too terrible to think about. But now, I have to add another phrase that rates a close second place, and perhaps surpasses the first in terms of immediate threat to my life and limb: "Cat on steroids"
It's kind of funny to think of, assuming that it's happening at least one county away, and I assume that my vet is laughing her ass off right now, albeit from the safety of her Berkshires summer retreat.
It wasn't too bad at first. I'd take this pitiful little dying cat, open her mouth, put a couple of pills in, then coax her to swallow. Then, unfortunately, they started to work. After a while, she started putting up a fight. Then, she started putting up a really big fight. At the same time, her appearance has started undergoing a subtle change. She used to be the cutest looking little half-Siamese you ever did see (assuming that it's permissible to use the words "cute" and "Siamese" in the same sentence). The last time I successfully fed her a pill, she was taking on a remarkable likeness to Bill the Cat. By Thursday morning, she'd mastered spitting (ack!) them back out, and by Thursday night, her aim had improved to the point where she could reliably spit them square into my eye.
I tried grabbing her, lovingly holding her down, and feeding her her medicine. She shared at me out of one bugged out eye, with several veins on her forehead standing at attention, and with her one free paw, managed to kick my butcher block sofa into the next room. Unfortunately, we were both sitting on it at the time. No go.
This morning, I awoke to the sound of her snacking on the livingroom carpet. Oh yeah, her appetite has improved considerably, as has her interest in me. I'm hoping there's no relationship between the two. When I went out to the livingroom to greet her, she lovingly pinned me to the floor and stuffed a couple of kitty pills down my throat.
I'm really not sure how the balance of power is ultimately going to work out here, but I'm afraid that the apartment manager is going to want another dozen damage deposits to tide him over until the prescription's run out. In the meantime, the phone's ringing off the hook, with football scouts asking if they can sign Streak up for the fall season.
This is an interesting way for the two of us to say our good-byes. I've been told that I can fully expect her to slide back downhill shortly after the medication runs out. For now, I'll go back to arm-wrestling her for that beef jerky I had hidden in the kitchen.
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