Heartache

Scruffy and Hidey have lived with us for 17 or more years. That’s a lot of time, not only in cat years.  Scruffy has had a heart murmur from the time we got him.  He now barely has space in the right or left, I don’t remember which, ventricle of his sweet little enlarged heart.  He’s also had allergies since he was a kitten and has horrible coughing spells that seem to coincide with allergic troubles of my own.  He spends his days engaged in very specific routines of his own devising which he follows religiously except when he doesn’t.  But whatever his routine du jour might be, it always involves a lot of sleeping and almost constant purring.  A simple side glance at Scruffy will elicit a purring session.  He’s easy going and pretty much lets me do whatever I want with him, which makes it easy to give him his 6 daily pills.  I don’t know why, but when I look at Scruffy, I think of a cardinal.

Hidey, although his blood sister, is the exact opposite of Scruff.  Where he is long and lanky, she is small and compact.  He is all angles, she is all curves.  He struts, she slinks.  He’s calm, she’s between high strung and wild.  He’s been showing his age, she still looks like a kitten.  He’s an angel with occasional lapses; and she has always been our little devil with an angel face. Hidey is a hummingbird.

Though the vet calls him “the amazing cat” because of his longevity in the face of all his ailments, I’ve always thought we would lose Scruffy before Hidey.  She’s always seemed eternal due to her energy and disregard for others.  Of late she had become more sedentary and was drinking a lot of water, which I attributed to aging but took her to the vet to check out anyway.  It turns out her kidneys are failing, which indeed is a sign of old age; and although a seemingly common ailment in old cats, this fact does nothing to mitigate the pain that comes with the certainty of her imminent death.

Although there is no possibility of a kitty kidney transplant here, we can keep Hidey comfortable for at least two more years by giving her subcutaneous fluids once a week.  For two months this summer that has involved me taking her on a long 17 mile drive to the vet, something she and Scruffy simply abhor: Scruffy more because he despises being confined to a kitty carrier, Hidey because she hates and fears strangers, and to her, everybody is a stranger. 

Catching Hidey to take her to the vet has always involved a battle of wills and games of deception: a pathetic dance between a tiny four legged animal and a two legged ape who dwarfs her and should be able to catch her at will.  Going to the vet is always traumatic for everyone since, at least when she was young, Hidey would not let me near her for three days after that.  Old age has mellowed her a bit and she now speaks to me on the same day. 

To avoid the trips to the vet, Curtis and I have started giving her fluids at home every Wednesday morning.  We figured it would be less traumatic, and it is... a little....  Now the trauma comes in a different form.  I no longer feel guilty for having to deceive her into going to the vet; now the guilt comes from poking her with a needle, not being very good at it, and causing her to yelp occasionally.  That always breaks my heart and makes me want to, no shit, just fucking die, even though I know I am not hurting her that much, and that without this treatment she would really be suffering.  Tuesday nights are a nightmare of anxiety for me; and apparently last Tuesday, as she made it plainly clear (and I will explain shortly), one for Hidey as well. 

One might ask how the hell Hidey knew it was Tuesday night.  Well, she didn’t, not exactly; after all Tuesdays are an entirely human concept, and she is most definitely not one of us.... On Tuesday nights I like to bring the bag of fluids and the stand on which we hang it to the kitchen so we can hydrate her first thing on Wednesday morning and get the nightmare over with.  We’ve been doing this for more than a month now without major incidents.  Last night, thinking nothing of it, I did the same thing.  I brought out the bag of fluids, put it on the counter, put the stand beside it, said good night to the cats and went to sleep.  And as the arrogant human that I am, I forgot that animals live by different cues altogether.  They think and perceive the world differently than we do, and last Tuesday night served as a reminder of that. 

Hidey certainly did not know it was “Tuesday” per se; but as cat, she has an extraordinary sense of smell, and although she could not see the bag of fluids on the kitchen counter, she knew it was there the moment I put it there.  And her brain, though the size of a walnut (and sometimes I wonder if hers is even that big), is sophisticated enough to know exactly what the fact of that bag being on the counter meant.  It meant that she could start worrying about Wednesday, not per se.

She made her worries felt at 3 a.m. when I heard a racket in Curt’s office.  For a moment I thought it was Scruffy playing like he used to do when he was young.  I got up to see.  It was Hidey scratching the sleeping bag that stays on the bed Curt or I use when either of us can’t sleep.  Hidey was single-mindedly, as only cats can do, scratching and lifting the bag.  I thought she was playing and went to see.  She got spooked when she saw me and scampered away.  I went to investigate only to find out that the little devil had peed all over the bed and was trying to “cover it up” with the sleeping bag.  This has always been her favorite means of communication when she is either pissed off or hurting.   She usually uses the bed in our bedroom to communicate her discontent; but this particular night, ours was occupied, so why not use the one in the office to tell us how she felt about “Wednesdays”.  Message transmitted and received Hidey.

Tuesday night approaches once more.  Anxiety, apprehension, guilt and anticipation will again weave their way into my dreams.  But this night, I will keep Hidey’s fluids bag in its cupboard and its stand in the living room behind the stereo speaker.  I will bring them out only on Wednesday morning while already having a firm grip on that little bundle of energy whose life force I will one day sorely miss, piss and all.