I’m not dealing well with my cat being sick. She is sick and I don’t know how bad, but it really worries me. I don’t know if I can handle it. I feel like I’m doing a bad job and she’s going to die. I know this is my mind exaggerating things, but that is the way I think. Last week, I noticed that she had lost some weight and so I took her to the vet. Apparently, her mouth problems flared up again making several of her teeth infected and she was having trouble eating as a result. The vet wanted to have several of her teeth removed at a cost of six hundred to a thousand dollars. This would be preceded by an ultrasound to check her heart to see if her pre-existing heart murmur condition would allow her to be put under anesthesia during the procedure to remove the teeth as well as a series of blood tests to check for liver and kidney damage at the additional cost of four to five hundred dollars making the ground total somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000-1500 dollars. This was not even counting the cost of the initial visit. The alternative, which I’ve opted for in the interim, is to keep her on a ‘pulse’ therapy of antibiotics every two weeks to keep infection at bay.
At any rate, I’m really starting to feel overwhelmed. She doesn’t seem to want to eat much anymore and seems so listless. She comes up to me and seems to want something but I can’t tell what it is. I have to keep her on this special high-fat anorexic diet so she can put on some weight before any type of surgery, as well as shoot pills down her throat twice a day before she claws me.
Tonight, I came home from work and fed her and sat down in my chair so she could jump up on my lap. She kept trying to come closer to brush my face and purred. She seemed so gaunt. I just thought about how I am so bad at dealing with this type of thing: with people being sick or dying, with the possibility that someone or something you care about can just wither before you until they’re just a pair of distant watery eyes set in a sack of bones, how death treats no one with dignity or respect, not only taking life but slowly leeching and draining it. It also made me think about how at my grandmother’s funeral, when the rest of my family was crying and clutching each other that I stood off to the side by myself and beat back any sign or stirring of emotion, because caring means accepting this harsh reality and I had no strength to accept that. Love means allowing yourself to be truly vulnerable to pain and loss. I can think of few things I find more scary than that, and yet the alternative is a life distant from others and alone which is sometimes what I think of the life I choose. I’m just afraid that when I unlock that door it will fly off its hinges and everything I try so hard to keep standing will fall down around me.
