CAT/cat scan

One day, when she was young, my cat Leona disappeared.

B and I looked everywhere in the house. She was nowhere. We searched under beds and couches, in corners and behind bookshelves. It was impossible to imagine where she could have gone. After an hour we worried as we looked at open-enough windows that perhaps she'd been young and graceless enough to fall to the ground from the third story.

We walked the perimeter of the house, looking at neighbors to see if they had seen anything unusual like a cat falling from the sky. We searched the backyard and the backyards of the houses that connected to ours. We walked down the dirty alley and out to the side street half a block down. The cat was nowhere. And as such, we began to despair.

We sat in our living room that night negotiating her absence. I would sit and try and concentrate on something else, then feel terrible for not feeling terrible enough about the thought of her sad and cold little body out in the streets. We held each others' hands and talked about how scared she must be and what we could do, which was nothing really, and how much we hoped we would find her.

It was about 9 at night when I looked up from the couch and saw a small furry creature sitting simply and still at the top of the stairs. I leapt up and ran to her and picked her up. I sat her between us and we both gave her pets and held her face and asked her where it was that she'd gotten to. After 30 minutes of adrenaline relief I asked B if she seemed a little "off."

"No," he said. "She's fine."

But I couldn't help watching her and sensing something sluggish. She didn't eat much when we opened the can of food. Her normally voracious gulping had been replaced by uninterested sniffs.

"Something is weird," I said. "She's not acting normal."

We resolved to check it out in the morning.

Early the next morning I got up and walked to the third floor and found green vomit spread across the floor like a Pollack painting. She'd been a nervous vomit-er since we'd gotten her, we'd thought little about the color in the days previous (I dunno, it's cat puke, maybe she ate a plant?) but now it seemed like an obvious warning sign we'd ignored.

She lay in the middle of the floor panting shallowly and looked up at me as if to signal that she was ready to feel better now. As I moved to pick her up she lay her head back down as if that was all the effort she had to spare.

Later when we searched the upstairs we concluded that she'd been inside the wall all that time we'd searched for her. We'd assumed she couldn't be in ear shot because when we'd opened the can of food she normally would tear ass to get there as fast as possible. With the pain in her belly, however, she'd decided it better just to lay in the dark and rest. This same moment later it occurred to me that she could have decided that company was never a comforting option and that she might have died in that wall and we'd have never known.

The emergency vet told us that because it was Saturday she'd have to send the cat to another clinic in the suburbs. We asked how much and she answered that if it was what she thought most likely the bill would land us in the thousands.

"Is there any chance she could get better?" I asked.

"Well, as I said, these little cats eat a piece of string while they're playing and their intestines are small and it gets caught. Right now all that bile is backing up inside her. That's why she's vomiting green. It's possible, I suppose, that it could pass on it's own. But there's only so much time before the intestinal tissue that's blocked begins to die. It's very painful, as you can see."

In the end we opted to send her for the cat CAT scans and the cat PET scans and the cat X Ray. They confirm the vet's suspicions, something is found unmistakably stopping up the inner gastrointestinal track. The cost for this already in our minds we beg to just wait a little to see if it might pass without surgical intervention.

"Possible, but I wouldn't count on it," the vet tells us with a sidelong glance that makes clear we are feelingless.

At hope we watch her vomit more and lay and get sicker and sicker. She is so small and soft and we pet her and whisper, "Please get better."

It is such an astronomical amount of money to spend on a cat. "There are people in the world who do not have access to this surgery," I think. "Are we really going to drop several months worth of income for this animal?" Leona, who we bought on impulse from a person at the SPCA holding her out to me, looks up from the bed and sighs. She was so calm the first time I held her. In the middle of a crowd she snuggled into my arms and purred as I scratched her head.

B and I pick up the credit card form, a loan designed specifically for this purpose, and begin filling it out. He calls his mother for help and I call other vets to see if there is anywhere else that can do the surgery for less than what we've been quoted. I cry on the phone with our regular vet as I try to explain that we literally just don't have the money.

A day later Leona is transferred and given a cat IV and cat anesthesia and undergoes cat surgery to remove the foreign body making her so sick. We have been here before, less than two years ago, which seems crazy as we tried to see if the suspicious mass on our previous cat could be removed. That surgery, far less expensive, was given such a positive prognosis that we assumed it was an obvious choice. When the tumors returned in force just months later we felt betrayed at both the vet and the universe.

It is not a string but a bit of exercise mat that is handed to us two days later in a small clear plastic bag. "Leona" it reads with my last name following hers. "She's really mine now," I think. "They've given her my last name." And we take her home with her shaved fore-leg where the IV was taped and a cone around her neck and a huge gash down her middle. She hates the morphine, presumably because it makes her feel weird, but we force her to take it because it's the only way she'll stop banging the cone against the crate we need to keep her in at night so she doesn't exert herself too much because she is not allowed to run or jump until the scars have healed. I watch her little eyes dilate as the drugs take effect and she looks at me confused and wobbly.

Several days later when we are able to let her out of the crate overnight she pees in the laundry basket.

Now, I sometimes I pick her up and look her in the face and tell her she has golden insides. I think about how she would, without question, be dead but for our expensive intervention. I think about how hard it was to consider anything but the fullest of options with this little cat and how impossible such decisions would be with a human sitting in the room with you. Leona wanted the pain to stop but it was I who decided that she shouldn't die. It feels like a crazy amount of responsibility.

She runs past me as I sit at my desk and knocks several books off the shelf she jumps up onto.

"What the hell?!" I scream. "You are the worst. You would have died if it wasn't for me."

Not that she understands this.

Not that I do either, really.