My Feline Fiasco

Bear with me, this will be long.

My former roommate and I adopted my kitty Callie from the pound almost 7 years ago. Initially, she was more of my roommate's cat than mine.

Callie is really sweet but she has a long history of poor decision-making skills. A few years ago she managed to get herself picked up by Animal Control and taken to kitty jail, the kind where they put strays to sleep if no one has claimed them in three days. My roommate and I were desperately searching for her and fortunately found out where she was the night of the 2nd day, the night before she would have been euthanized. Oh, and we also had to go to Night Court and appear before the prosecutor because apparently in that city it is against the law to have a cat off-leash. Giggle. Fun times.

About six months after that, she managed to somehow get herself stuck on the second-floor window ledge of my next door neighbor's house. I'm still not sure how she got up there as there's nothing like a tree nearby. Naturally my neighbors were out of town, and I only had a six-foot ladder (she was about 20 feet high). Four hours later she was still crying up there and we could not figure out how to get her down. Did you know that firefighters do not rescue cats out of trees anymore? Apparently that is a myth, at least in University Park. So our final solution was for me to stand on the ladder with my arms stretched up holding an empty litter box and trying to convince her to jump down into it (about a 4 foot drop for her). It took about half an hour of cheerleading before she finally got the nerve.

About a year after that, my alley neighbor ran over her with the car. We were SO lucky that her only injury was a badly smashed back leg. So shattered in fact that our only option was to amputate. Her surgery and the three months of nursing her after that were awful...truly, it was a heinous wound and she required a significant amount of careful nursing. This is the time when Callie and I bonded and she became mine.

For obvious reasons she has been an indoor-only kitty for 5 years now. She has been perfectly healthy and very sweet....until...

About eight weeks ago she started sneezing, a lot. In big fits, like 100 times in a row. I took her to the vet after two weeks of this. He thought it was nothing to worry about, he said she definitely wasn't sick and didn't have a disease, he wasn't sure what it was but thought it would resolve itself.

Well it didn't, so this week we went back. He got concerned about the possibility of a cancerous tumor in her nasal passage, or bad teeth causing problems because it's all so connected in that area. So he sent us off to a specialist who could take x-rays and so forth.

We took her to the specialist who put her under and ran a bunch of tests and sure enough it's BOTH a tumor in her nasal passage, and three bad teeth. He said the teeth were so badly deteriorated that she must have been in significant pain for quite some time :(.

At 4:00 on Thursday she had surgery to extract the teeth and take a biopsy of the tumor, and they sent her home that night. Since then it's been another round of nursing and I'm having flashbacks to the time after her amputation....we're having to give her pain meds via syringe which she hates and fights every step of the way, and she has trouble eating even soft food. She bleeds, which they said is normal but is hard to watch. I feel so sorry for her! Her eyes are continually dilated from the pain meds she is on. (Funny: when I worry that she is in pain, Bill laughs and says "Look at her, Wendy, she's high as a kite!" and she is). Despite all this, when we're not shoving a syringe down her throat or trying to help her eat she's actually very happy. The one thing that is better this time than last is that all her wounds are in the inside of her mouth, so I don't have to worry about an exposed wound like I did with her amputation.

But another set of flashbacks is occurring. When I was married before (eons ago) my ex was a man who believed pets are an accessory not a member of the family...the dogs were relegated to the back yard rarely to see the inside of the house, and he did not believe in spending money at the vet on pets. Once when his dog broke her tail he would not allow me to take her to the vet. It gave me great anxiety, pain, and anger towards him for treating his pets that way. At the same time I internalized this deep anxiety about spending money on animals because it made my partner so unhappy.

Well needless to say we have dropped a LARGE amount of unexpected money on Callie this week. I'm talking in the several thousands. Which is a major setback for us because we were SO close, about a month away, from paying off our last consumer debt. Sigh. So I've been worried and stressed all week, that it's so much money for "my" cat and that Bill will be mad at me or hold it against me. I should have given him more credit and not underestimated him, because he didn't even blink an eye and his attitude was "of COURSE we'll take care of her, she's OUR cat, I don't want her in pain, don't worry about the money!" He is wonderful. And he's also helping me with the nursing, which is such a huge blessing. Still, I have this residual guilt about the money...and I really, really hate seeing my precious little kitty in pain.

Callie is a mess! She always has been. But I love her. And soon enough when the stress goes away and she has healed I think I will be able to laugh at how goofy she looks, missing her front top canine teeth. She's going to be one funny-looking cat with all the body parts she is missing!