Nine Lives: Cat’s Luck
by
Glenn Ward
(Posted March 25, 2018)
“The H-bomb fell the other next day.
The A-bomb fell in the exact same way.
First Russia! Then China! And then the USA.
The entire human race was left without a chance to pray...
But the cat came back the very next day.
The cat came back. They thought he was a goner,
But the cat came back. He just wouldn't stay away.”
Harry Miller, The Cat Came Back, revised version.
One night in late December of 2015, while my cancer was in remission, Doris and I had just gone to bed when the girls came upstairs and began to bang on our door, telling us that there was a cat on our deck and that it was looking into our house. Like many people, we like cats but also knew that pets were a lot of work and that, despite their initial promises, kids had a tendency to make promises to care for pets but then failed to follow up, leaving mom and dad to do the primary feeding, cleaning up after and caring for what my grandmother used to call the wee beasties.
“Come and look” Lauren and Alyssa yelled as they took turns squeezing past each other to get into our bedroom doorway.
“Is it still there?” I asked.
“It was still there a minute ago,” Alyssa yelled, followed by those words that all parents dread. “Can we keep it? Please! We’ll take care of it! Promise!”
“Let me get dressed and I’ll take a look at it.” Lauren had gone back downstairs and was yelling that the cat was still looking inside the house from her perch on our deck. “Don’t let it in the house!” I yelled.
“Aw Dad, it’s so cute!”
“It’s soooo cute,” Lauren yelled again as I got dressed. “It’s just a kitten.” More words that every parent dreaded. An adult cat could have been wandering around from one of the farms that surround our yard and simply decided to check out our place, but a kitten ... There was only one feasible reason a kitten would be in our yard: it had been dropped off by some unfeeling so and so. A kitten would only find itself in our yard for that reason.
When I got downstairs, I noticed that, while smaller than a full-grown adult, the cat wasn’t really a kitten anymore. I opened the door to our back deck and yelled at the cat while I stomped my feet towards it. It leapt off the deck — a good 6-foot drop — and took off at full speed into the darkness at the border between out backyard and a neighbouring farmer’s field.
“Awww, Dad,” my daughters whined in unison.
I tried to keep a tough exterior. “It doesn’t belong here. It belongs to one of the farms nearby and was just looking for a warm place to stay tonight.” We have no non-farm neighbours (correction: our nearest non-farm neighbours are several hundred metres away) so, if the cat was to survive, it would have to adapt to becoming a barn cat or, if it already was a barn cat from a neighbouring farm, it would have to settle whatever personal grievance it had with the other barn cats at that particular farm or find a new farm in which to live.
I went back to bed and told my wife what I’d done. “I can’t believe you did that to the poor thing” she replied. She, like me, had grown up in the country but was even tougher by a wide margin, but mostly tougher towards two-legged beasties than the four-legged ones.
“Alright,” I answered. “You can go down and offer it food to get it back. I’m sure it’s hiding just past the edge of our property”.
She suppressed a smile. “Alright, you got me,” and we both went to sleep.
The night had been very cold — minus double digits — and in the morning, when I went out to the garage to get more wood for the woodstove, lo and behold, the cat was in the garage. I told the girls and realized that I had begun to sing the song The Cat Came Back under my breath. More likely, the cat never went away.
“Why did you put it in the garage?” I asked my daughters.
“We didn’t”, they told me. “Mom must have put it there.” As unlikely as that seemed, it was the only possible explanation unless one of those holes in our aging garage door had rotted so much that it had enlarged to accommodate a not-very-large young cat.
Since my wife had gone to check out a medical emergency at one of her nursing homes, I had to come to a decision.
“Okay,” I announced, “Let’s take a look at it. But only to see is it’s been fixed.” Actually, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to tell if it had been spayed, but I was relying on the fact that my daughters would be even less able to tell if I knew what I was doing, and so I could fool them into believing that it hadn’t been fixed, indicating that, indeed, the cat was a farmer’s cat and could take care of itself.
“Okay, let her in,” I announced with a sigh as I was still reluctant to do what I was about to do. My youngest daughter did the honours and the cat came in, purring so loudly that my other daughter and I could hear it from more than ten feet away. Within seconds, it was acting as if it was at home in our house.
“Awwwww, she’s so cute”, my daughters said at the same time, after inspecting her and determining that she was a female. We had some cat treats that we’d used the year before to lure one of our neighbours’ friendlier barn cats to our yard (don’t ask), and so we put some in a bowl on the floor in front of her. She devoured them without a pause and, within a minute or so, she approached the patio door and began to look desperate to get outside. Too desperate, in my opinion.
“Open the door!” I shouted. Let her outside!” We can exit to our patio from two rooms but the one we were in at that moment hadn’t been opened since the weather had turned cold. My daughter struggled to get the frozen door open. “Out of the way!” I yelled in panic as I pushed her away and tried to push the door open myself. I failed and saw that the cat had jumped onto the leather seat cushions on one of our chairs and, right there in front of my very eyes, had loosened her bowels onto them. My daughters understood the seriousness of what we were witnessing, as did the cat, and our yelling had frightened her into jumping onto the hardwood floor where she continued to loosen her bowels as she looked for a way outside. “Shut the door to the house!” I yelled but my daughter was way ahead of me and had already done so, trapping the cat in the sunroom addition. By now the cat seemed to be finished meeting nature’s call.
The girls looked as devastated by the turn of events as did I. I, however, saw an opportunity in the event as well. “We’ll make a deal,” I suggested. “If I have to clean up after the cat, I’ll do so after which we’ll take her to The Humane Society as an abandoned cat. If you guys want to keep her, then you have to clean up the mess, and I mean clean it up completely. I’ll get the disinfectant wipes and some paper towels for you and then I’m going to check out the garage door to see how the cat got inside. By the time I’m done, the mess will either be cleaned up or not and what I see in this room will make my decision for me.”
I went out into the garage, confident that my daughters would spend the time arguing over who would have to do more cleaning up rather than spend their time actually cleaning up. My idea had been a brilliant move and, after I was satisfied that there had been no holes large enough to allow the poor creature to enter the garage, I returned to the house to find that the floor and the chair were spotless, utterly spotless. They’d also fixed, at least as much as anyone could fix, the patio door and they were, once again, feeding her. I couldn’t believe my eyes. They’d out-foxed me.
When my wife came home, she seemed relieved that I’d had a change of heart and told me that the woman who rented a room in our basement texted her to tell her that she’d let the cat into the garage. “She said it was too cold and windy outside and the cat was sooo cute.”
I told her about the deal our daughters and I had made. “Congratulations. You now own a cat.” First, though, before we let the cat into the main part of the house, my wife made a few half-hearted phone calls to the neighbours during which she quickly determined that none even owned house-broken cats and, as far as barn cats went, they weren’t even sure how many they owned, never mind how many might currently be missing.
My wife gave the cat a thorough examination and determined 1) that the cat had not been spayed, and 2) that she had an open gash running along the inside of her front leg. We were able to get an appointment with the vet for later that morning. As soon as my wife had mentioned the gash, the vet cut her off. “That’s a fan belt injury,” she announced confidently. “You see them all the time when the weather is this cold.”
The rest of the morning was spent purchasing a litter box, a bag of kitty litter (and the cat knew how to use them, supporting my wife’s assertion that it had been a house cat that had crawled up onto a warm car engine) and one of cat food, each item dropped with a thud onto the porch floor like a nail in the coffin of my freedom for the remaining months or years of my life. “Just think,” my wife and daughters reminded me at unnatural intervals. “You’ll have company during the day now.”
“Not until I’ve read all those books on my reading list first,” I replied. “Until then, the cat is lockout out of my office.”
“You’ll be missing the cat very soon.”
“We’ll see.”
The cat, which the girls named Bailey, grew accustomed to our house and our dog very quickly and soon they were sleeping together. The cat was rather pretty and, as she matured, learn to carry herself with a regal bearing. Furthermore, she was a mouser and we soon learned to check her mouth for living prey before we let her into the house. That was one feature that put her in my good graces, as we ran a constant battle to rid our country house of mice (and even, at least once, rats).
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROsLfGrBgDM
Then one night about three months after she arrived, Bailey didn’t come to the door when it was time to go to bed. She had the same routine every evening — go out, relieve herself and come back to the patio door a few minutes later — but this night she didn’t come back. I used it as a “teachable moment” and explained to the girls that cats are nocturnal creatures comfortable with the advantages nature provided to them when it came to hunting after dark.
“She’s probably fine,” I told my daughters as they took turns on the patio calling her by name. “She’ll be at the door tomorrow”. Eventually, they gave up and went to bed.
When she didn’t come back the next morning and evening, the girls began to get frantic, and I had to change my consoling message somewhat. My message now was one of the cruel reality of nature and the fact that, when you brought a cat into a house, you simply borrowed it from it’s natural environment, and nature could return to claim it at any time. Still, I began to think about her and the beautiful symmetry of her markings and even found a copy of Blake’s poem to read, imagining the cat as I read it. I’d seen her try to bring a dead chipmunk into the house on more than one occasion, and the markings on the dead chipmunks stood up well against her own markings, so I guess beautiful — if not fearful — symmetry conferred no right to life in our yard.
Baily the huntress
By the third or fourth evening, you could detect a diminished effort, as the girls’ calls were perceptibly weaker. Then, all of a sudden, one of my daughters began to cry out “Bailey’s back!” and a new level of energy rolled through the rooms of our house as each daughter joined in the cry. My wife carried the cat into my office and, even from my desk, I could hear it purring in her arms.
“Look who’s here,” my wife announced.
“She smells like horses,” one of my daughters said, and they all took turns smelling her fur.
Eventually, the conversation wound down after our daughters took turns trying to imagine where she’d been for four days or, more accurately, which horse farm she’d been to, and they each insisted that one of her sisters could sleep with her, as none of them wanted their bed to smell like horses. Eventually my wife and I were alone while the girls took the cat downstairs to be fed.
“I’ve never seen such a broad grin as you had on your face when you saw that she was back,” she teased.
“Okay, I was glad to see her again, hale and hearty” I admitted.
“It was a miracle, wasn’t it?” she added.
Now fast forward nine months to a beautiful Fall day. My wife and I were working in the yard and my wife walked over to me and, when she got to me, she held out her hand as if making an offering. It took me a few seconds to figure out just what I was looking at: a very small orange-coloured kitten. At first, I didn’t see any movement and so I asked my wife if it was dead but she reassured me that it did move a bit when she carried it over. She found it lying in the front yard camouflaged in the dead maple leaves. We had no idea how it got there and how long it had been there (our dog had been out earlier and didn’t make a fuss, so we assume that it wasn’t there earlier, but who knows). It could barely open it’s eyes and fluid was oozing from the eyes and nose, and it was barely responsive to our touch, so we put it in a box on some old towels and gave it some milk in a saucer. A couple of hours later, we checked it, wondering if it had died yet or not, and it was feisty and active and, when we took it out of the box, it followed us everywhere while we continued with our yard work. Its fur was a total mess and so we brought it inside and bathed it and that seemed to help also. Its eyes were red and runny, but it looked a lot better after its bath, and we realized that it was going to survive and thrive. We thought of calling the Humane Society but hesitated: we’d quickly come to admire his fighting spirit and survival instinct and worried that they would refuse to accept a kitten with no shots and a respiratory infection or, worse, take it but euthanize it to keep it from infecting the other cats, so we decided to try to find someone from the girls’ high school or my wife’s patient population who might want him.
Keanu when we found him
As usual, what we thought was the great mystery of where he came from turned out to be no mystery at all to the vet we took him to for a check up. She said that kittens his age are just starting to leave the “nest” and they tend to explore and wander among the farm equipment. Then, when the farmer starts up the tractor, truck, whatever, and drives off, the kitten hangs on for dear life. When they come to a corner and the farmer slows down or stops, the kitten will jump off and head for the nearest buildings. She estimated that ours could have been there for a day or so before we found him. He was only about 4-5 weeks old and too young to be weaned, so the respiratory infection he was suffering from would either kill him or make him stronger. Poor little guy: so young to be the object of a Nietzschean theory. Anyway, he’s happy now and loves cuddling. We still raise the topic of giving him away to a good home, but it’s increasingly unlikely that the girls, and my wife, are going to be willing to give him up now.
As my wife says, “it was a miracle that he survived”.
Death Row and Awaiting the Governor’s Decision
When you receive chemotherapy, you often find yourself living in intervals of three months (sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the treatment). The effectiveness of the treatment is being monitored by assessing whether or not anything has changed in your disease status since your last three-month assessment. As a result, you undergo a 90-day cycle somewhat similar to being a death row inmate who appeals their status and awaits the Governor’s decision every three months. The difference is that, in the vast majority of cases of cancer, people awaiting a reprieve will receive one, then another, then another, until they stop receiving them. Eventually, for many cancer patients, the oncologist will give them the bad news that the tumours are no longer responding to treatment and that, while there are other types of treatment available, they will have rather nasty side effects and are unlikely to stave off the tumours for long.
They say that there are no atheists in foxholes. I can’t say that that’s true in this secular age, but I can say that, at least as far as my wife and I are concerned, it’s difficult to not be a little superstitious, if not downright religious, regarding our three-month visits. It’s become a bit of a game for us. At our clinic, we sit in a waiting area outside the consulting rooms and watch the oncologists bustle in and out of the rooms. When our own oncologist goes by, we try to interpret his look. Is he avoiding making eye contact? If so, is he avoiding eye contact with other patients or just with us? Also, we play a game where we try to interpret the luck we’re having on a particular day. If we hit a row of green lights on the drive in to the hospital, we’ll joke that we’re having a lucky day until we decide that we’ve wasted our luck on traffic lights and left little luck for important things like my cancer. Conversely, if we hit a lot of red lights, we’ll decide that we’ve used up our luck on traffic lights and left no luck to deal with our situation with the cancer.
A few weeks ago, we had our regularly scheduled three-month appointment with the oncologist and did our ritual survey of lucky and unlucky events. When the time came to go up to the 4th floor to the oncology clinic, the elevator door opened and we found the elevator empty and the button already pressed for the 4th floor. This is powerful, we both agreed. Whatever this meant for our luck that day, it was going to be a force of cosmic dimensions. We arrived in the waiting area and, within minutes, we were directed to the treatment room where we had to wait for only a few minutes before my regular oncologist came into the room. “So,” he said as he always says as he sits down in the chair across from me, “we’ve got the CT scan results”. This, time, however, the story of the CT scan results differed from the one he usually told. This time it was a story of nodes and tumours spreading inside my liver and lungs. I looked over at my wife to make sure I was hearing correctly and the tears welling up in her eyes told me that the story I was hearing was the correct one.
The oncologist then moved the discussion to one of treatment. There was one type of chemotherapy left that hadn’t been tried on me, but the response rate to that particular treatment was low. There was no talk of survival, no mention that 20 percent of people who try the treatment survive: only that 20 percent of people who try the treatment respond, and they don’t respond for long but for a few months at best. The way I used to explain it to my students was that the significance level of the treatment was high, but that the effect size was low. I was low effect size but high significance, when it was effect size that was important.
We had to stop at the pharmacy before we left the hospital and so I sat in the waiting area while my wife picked up some prescriptions for me. I found myself looking around the waiting area, gathering comfort from my familiarity with it. Soon, perhaps in another few months, I would be done with treatment completely and, in all likelihood, would cut my ties to the Cancer Centre and switch exclusively to home care and then, after a few weeks or months, I would begin hospice care. This place had become a regular fixture in my life over the past few years, and I would miss it. When I began, I used to notice that I was often the healthiest-looking patient in the clinic. Eventually, however, I began the inevitable slide that advanced cancer patients find themselves going through. First, I began to take the elevator to the upper floors or, even, just one floor. Then I began to use the courtesy wheelchairs provided for patients. Eventually I would notice that people would offer me assistance without my having to ask, and a glance in the mirror explained why. I was gaunt, my eyes and cheeks were sunken, and I just had that “look”. The look said that I was on the downward slope.
On the drive home, we had the discussion about who would tell the girls the bad news and exactly how we would explain it. My wife eventually volunteered to do it and said that she would figure out what to say while she was talking to them. I knew that she would do a good job of it. Sometimes, the spontaneous approach is the best one to take, especially since the girls, on previous occasions, didn’t hesitate to ask questions for clarification about the details. Still this was going to be a difficult conversation. Previous conversations were always accompanied by hope that there was still a lot of time left: perhaps to be measured in years. Now, the end was likely to come in months.
As we drove, I thought about the time left and it dawned on me that the cats were likely to outlive me, not by a year or two but by at least another decade. As my wife said on more than one occasion, it was a miracle they survived in the first place.
Great, I thought. Here am I, adjusting my lifestyle to losses in appetite, losses in weight, losses in pretty much everything, and a miracle descends like a blessed blanket over our house and ... gets used up on our cats.
