I suppose it was to be expected. I mean, I did and I didn’t… expect it. If anything, I thought my age might be a complication. If anything. The women in my family line seem to get themselves in the family way just by thinking about it. Honeymoon babies, whoops babies, accidents and surprises (never mistakes. No, never). A sister with an eating disorder and no period to speak of? Babies! Just like that! And because my own inner lady workings always seemed to work with boring predictability, I took it for granted that I would do the same.
So much for granted, in fact, that during our house renovations this spring, we converted the guest room into a nursery. The door to that room stays closed. I don’t need to see the giraffe wall sconces to know that they are there, dimmed to off, while we make very vague plans about what to do next. While I silently contemplate how many of those ‘next steps’ we’ll take before I’ve had enough.
The Dork Lord wants a kid more than he does a new car, he says. Meaning, whatever it takes financially, is what it takes. In for a penny, in for a pound! What he doesn’t fully understand is that I may not be willing to go to those lengths. To be excavated and augmented for the off-est of off chances it will take. I am not one of those women who will suffer infertility for years and years because I will stop hoping long before that. Because my insides are not made of rainbows and unicorns and optimism. And I am not going to arrive at rainbows and unicorns after I cycle through the requisite stages of grief. I know me better than that.
The diagnosis itself came from a nurse – not even my doctor – over the phone one afternoon while I was at work. The doctor won’t answer when I call back with questions about my condition, either; I’ve landed on a list of the childless and desperate and those calls get triaged. Leave a message. Someone will call you back. That someone will probably be a nurse so you’d better not expect to speak with the person who’s been forearm-deep in your lady parts.
Having thanked the nurse (for what now, I wonder), I sat there for a minute, blinking at the gray wall of my cubicle before sending a text to my husband, who called back immediately, wanting to talk about it. I did not want to; I didn’t answer.
This is, actually, as close as I have come to talking about it. I will avoid discussing the actual diagnosis, though, so do not ask about it. Because it feels so personal – and so personally devastating. If you know me at all, you understand why we won’t talk about it. Why it’s such sacred territory we just won’t go there. One of the first reactions to the news was from my sister who asked, “Are you going to adopt then?” I’d been officially barren for all of ten minutes and already I knew everything I needed to know about my predicament: Keep it to yourself. Because no one will know what to say. Even those who should know better.
I know I should, but I take no comfort in the shared experience of infertility – the message boards and support groups of other women who’ve gone down this same road. I spent only a few minutes on one of those message boards and felt nothing but disdain at the weight of this unbearable disappointment being condensed into pithy acronyms by women whose hopes were made and dashed by the indeterminate differences in the firmness of their cervices or the soreness of their boobs. I have nothing to say to women whose periods they still call Aunt Flo or refer to sex as a Baby Dance. Grow the fuck up.
“You’re all fucking idiots,” I whisper back at my iPad and switch over to the news (also replete with idiocy) before landing an episode of Veep. There’s an odd sort of comfort in foul language.
The disdain is directed inwardly, too, and so much more malicious. I’ve been filled, until there is no space left for much else, with a self-loathing that words cannot form an adequate description of. It’s hate, raw and ugly. And no one can understand it. Not my husband. Not my sisters (two of whom are pregnant, incidentally). And the silence makes the hate run even deeper and colder. You have to hide it, you know. There’s not really room in the world for people who feel so much ugliness.
Some days, though, there’s an odd sort of perkiness to this new reality of mine. I think about all the vacations we can take without a bit of guilt. About all the things I can have and the temper tantrums I won’t have to endure. But that’s false and fleeting. Mostly what I am is numb.
If you sent in a donation to help with the sick kittens a couple months ago and you did not get a thank you note – I’m sorry! I sent them! Perhaps without stamps on them (or something similarly stupid), because some people aren’t getting thank you notes and they haven’t come back to me, so it’s the only thing I can think happened. Plus, it’s totally something I would do when dumb from sleep deprivation.
Please don’t think I forgot you or I was being rude. I’m going to send out a new batch this weekend (I’ve already put stamps on the envelopes!) and make it right.
Dick and Jane are my tenth and eleventh rescues since moving into our house last May. Each time I say, “I’m done! NO MORE KITTENS!” – when my heart feels worn out and my shoulders ache with the tension of worrying over the well-being of these tiny creatures, over whether I’m doing it right – the neighborhood delivers another wayfaring furkid. Surprise! The feral population on our street alone is a tremendous and heartbreaking problem. An epidemic. And sometimes, I feel so overwhelmed by this fierce personal responsibility I feel to each and every abandoned, mistreated, deserving animal. And that’s why “NO MORE KITTENS!” turned into “OKAY, JUST THESE TWO KITTENS.” Because someone has to do the right thing.
Dick and Jane came running down the sidewalk on Sunday night. I was on the front lawn, waving to a neighbor when they came sprinting, darting into the road. Their story is particularly sad. Two weeks ago, at ten weeks old, they were thrown out of a neighbor’s house to fend for themselves – because one of them was having problems with the litter box. I have since come to realize that he is terrified of it. My mind reels with images of possible abuses. What’s more, they hadn’t eaten in days. The abandoner didn’t want to leave food on the front porch, “because [she] didn’t want all the other stray cats to eat it.”
I know all this BECAUSE SHE TOLD ME.
Nonchalantly. Like animal abuse and abandonment is totally understandable.
It’s sickening.
So, now they’ve been to the vet, gotten their first vaccinations, tested negative for diseases and parasites, and our litterbox-shy friend is improving drastically in that area. The most devastating part of this just might be how much they simply want to be loved. They can be in the middle of the craziest kitten romp (pounce! tumble! chase!), but the minute I sit down, they climb into my lap and purr themselves to sleep.
Please share this post with anyone you think may be able to open their home to Dick and Jane.
These beauties come in a matching set (I am most firmly set against separating them, considering the trauma they have gone through) and come in a fashionable silvery gray – a complement to even the most sophisticated fall wardrobe!
We are, it would seem, squarely out of the woods. And our minds.
The little one who wouldn’t play? Now she won’t stop. Nelly not pictured in the video. She was off plundering and/or conquering foreign lands. I’m now pretty convinced she’s half Viking.
“The good part is, you will be able to put them down humanely.”
I stared at the vet tech, put my hand over my mouth and choked on a sob. At eight weeks old, the kittens had contracted feline distemper, a virus that, with rare exceptions, is lethal in kittens. Mama cat had been adopted the day before and the antibodies from her breast milk had run their course. The kittens were defenseless.
“We call it the ‘wasting away disease,’” she said. “Their immune systems are simply too immature to fight it.”
When the tech took the kittens into the back to make them more comfortable with fluids and anti-nausea injections, I sank into a chair and cried, my mouth buried in the crook of my arm to muffle the sound of hysteria. A text from my mother read, “Best thing is to say goodbye.” Our family had dealt with distemper before. It was devastating.
I gathered up the kittens, the antibiotic I knew we had little hope of keeping in their violently churning tummies, paid the vet and went home to cry pitilessly into my husband’s shoulder. Once the kittens had fallen asleep, I began scouring the internet for information on Feline Panleukopenia. I shouldn’t have. It was horrifying. Nothing I read gave me any hope of them lasting more than three days; I understood then why the vet had only given me five days worth of medication. He knew they would be dead before it ran out.
Medical science told me to let them go. But I could not. My reading told me that the virus was like the parvo virus in dogs. Our family had dealt with parvo before, too. It required around-the-clock, intensive care, forced fluids and nutrition. And faith. Else, how could you spend hour after hour battling something you can’t see? If I could keep the kittens alive long enough to develop antibodies against the virus, they could make it. But first I had to take on fever spikes, drops in body temperature, shock and dehydration. So I held them while they shivered, tucked them inside my sweatshirt and cried streams of snot onto my sleeve. “I’m sorry,” I said, over and over. “You deserve better than this. Better than me.”
In-hospital care would have cost $500 per kitten, per day. It was simply not an option for us. I was eaten up with remorse and guilt.
Day Two: Monday
Every two hours, day and night, I gathered up the babies and squirted Pedialyte from a syringe into their tiny mouths. They shuddered and cried and I stroked their backs while I whispered, “Please don’t throw up. Please don’t throw up.” They did anyway. We took two trips, one in the morning and one at night, to the vet for fluids and anti-nausea injections. At 4:00AM, Nelly drank on her own. Nelly, who twelve hours before had convinced me of the doctor’s advice to let them go. Each time her body heaved to throw up, bloody water came out the other end.
“How long can I let them go on like this?” I asked my husband, a hand over my face to hide the ugliness of my agony.
“Until you know the medicine will or won’t work.”
With Nelly stabilizing, I had a bit of hope we could save at least one. The others fought through unbearable nausea and debilitating diarrhea, crying when their stomachs cramped hard enough to force thin, foamy water from their otherwise empty tummies.
My husband woke me between feedings. “What happened? Is everything okay?” I had been crying in my sleep.
Day Three: Tuesday
I took another sick day to nurse the kittens, sleeping while they slept. Two more trips to the vet (after a kind and generous gift from a Facebook friend I’d never even met, continued care was made much more doable) and countless attempts at peeling Nelly off my yoga pants when she’d scamper up them to perch on my shoulder like a parrot. The runt of the litter, it both surprised me and didn’t that she had such verve. Such fight. When she went into the litter box and, for the first time in days, did not cry, I clapped when she produced a real poop. No one has ever been so happy to see poop, ever. Twelve hours later, Hamilton followed suit.
Day Four: Wednesday
With two kittens stabilized and two still showing little progress, I had to go back to work, stomach sick from constant worry. Gentry wouldn’t eat and Holly wouldn’t engage. At lunch, I went home to do a round of fluids and food and as I cradled Gentry, I heard a sound – the slightest little hint, barely perceptible, that he had a stuffy nose. Kittens who can’t smell don’t eat. I ran to the bathroom where the Little Noses baby nose spray was from our last Mission Impossible: Kitten Rescue and dosed him up. By evening, he was going back for thirds.
Day Five: Thursday
Holly isn’t much for playing yet (aside from toying with the string on my sweatshirt) but she’s eating, drinking and cuddling – no longer choosing to slink off and sleep alone under the sofa. Nelly and Hamilton are driving. me. effing. crazy. Which is to say, they feel great. Gentry is getting there, too.
I told my boss that I was going to sleep through the night and start wearing eye makeup again, because I feel safe in saying, we did it, no more crying. Yeah, it will have to be bargain basement eye make-up after $850 in vet bills over four days, but ask me if that’s too much to pay not to have to euthanize four eight-week-old babies. Or don’t ask; just have a look for yourself.
Nelly & Hamilton (who still needs a mommy)
Holly & Gentry
And last but not least, Mama Nox, in her new home with her new favorite boy, Caleb. All but Hamilton have new homes to go to (as soon as they’re all better) but this adoption gives me the most joy. I worried and worried and worried (as I do) that Mama Cat wouldn’t find a home. But someone scooped her up into a loving home with a little boy who wants nothing more than a kitty of his own to sleep on his bed. My heart hurts, a little, with how happy that makes me.
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