Maggie almost died. At one point her red blood cell count was so low that it was half the level that the emergency vet automatically authorized a complete blood transfusion. We didn't give her the transfusion because it would have cost around $2000 and it would only have been a palliative, not a cure. Instead we brought her home wrapped in a blanket, and force fed her Science Diet fishmeal, chlorophyll from algae, prednisone, water and some baby foods to give her a break from the horrors of a medical diet. I stayed home three days from work, spent a dozen nights with sleep interrupted by any sound that might have been her moan or death rattle. Last Monday she meowed for the first time in two weeks. Tuesday she made it down a few stairs on her own, and Wednesday she went to the bathroom by herself. I noticed that the sunlight and fresh air made a visible improvement in her tone...the rustle of chipmunks and the songs of birds made her lift her head and stare through eyes deepened into blank, black holes by the war ravaging her immune system and bone marrow.
The vet had administered three vaccines at once. As he was preparing to do it, I was alarmed that Maggie's 11 year old system might not handle such a load all at once. I asked him, and he reassured me that one cat in a million had a bad reaction.
I should have told him Maggie was a cat in a million.
We found her as a kitten, her head almost bitten off by a dog, her sides layed open, her muzzle flayed and bleeding. She was huddled in the corner of a dirt-floored garage at the duplex I was moving into. I was a fresh emigrant from marriage, immigrant to separation, neophyte to divorce, and full of myself. Sam heard her mewl, a weak but insistant cry. I found a flashlight and he found her. We took her to the vet immediately, and he gave her less than a 50 percent chance of surviving the night. Later he said her survival was the most amazing thing he had witnessed in his career at that point. She was one in a million.
Today she still needs to be force fed, because unlike other cats on prednisone she doesn't take water or food copiously. She seems revolted by water and food, in fact, and it takes superhuman effort on my part to hold her down and squirt the grey-green stinking pablum into the back of her throat. I didn't know her eyes could open in horror that wide, that desperately, as when she tastes the stuff.
Despite the debacle of mealtimes, she still comes to me and climbs on my lap. I pet her frazzled looking fur, and talk to her. I remind her of some of the funny and harrowing times we have had together. I don't mention the times she was my only friend after the divorce, when my family and others had faded into the embarassed distance of victim's kin who cannot broach the silence or injustice of a terrible time. I think about those times, when I would lie alone in the upstairs bedroom, the streetlight casting shadows on the ceiling that looked like the webs of human-sized spiders. Maggie would climb up on my chest and position herself so she could look into my eyes. She seemed to say "Hey, get over it. You may miss your kids more than you would your own liver if it was cut out with a rusty knife, but you get them back half the time. You may fear a world that can rip your life open with both hands just for its amusement. But I've seen worse. I've seen the inside of my own face hanging off my skull, buddy, and you were there for me. So get over it. I got your back."
I think about these times. But I can't remind her, because the words get stuck in my throat. The tears were there a few times for her, but she wouldn't want them. She's way too tough for that. She just wants my knee when she wants it, and no more of the damn medical diet.
Not a very sentimental broad for someone who probably saved my life when the human sized spiders spun their webs, in the dark, outside my window. But her heart is in the right place, and it seems to have enough red blood cells for now. That'll do for me.
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