That Goddamn Cat

That's when I began to scream.

I was awakened the previous day, Sunday, by the sound of Guy (aka The Big Guy, aka Good, aka The Retarded One) coughing up a hairball. "Christ," I thought as I lay there in bed, "something else to clean up." But when I got up and looked, there was no hairball to be found.

As the day progressed, he kept making like he was about to cough something up, but he never did. As the hours passed, he grew more and more listless?settling himself in on the bed and staring at a white wall. He stopped purring and eating?the two things he did almost without ceasing. I began to worry a little, but not too much. I looked up the symptoms in a couple cat books, and was assured that he just had a really bad hairball, and that it was nothing to worry about.

By the time I went to bed that night, however, I was pretty fucking worried. I lay there awake all night, listening to make sure he kept breathing. And when nothing had changed by the next morning, I picked up the phone and called the vet.

I explained his symptoms to the receptionist, fully expecting that she'd tell me that it was just, as I was hoping, a really bad hairball, that I could rest easy and get on with my life. But instead, she said, "You'd better get him in here as soon as possible."

I yanked the carrier from the closet and ran it into the front room, where he still sat staring at the wall.

That's when he started vomiting blood, and that's when I began to scream.

Complicating matters was the fact that Guy had never been in a real carrier before. So now, seconds after he had spewed a few pints of blood across the floor, I was forced to wrestle him into this strange, alien contraption, while yelling, near hysterics, "Ya gotta do it?it's for your own fucking good!" Which, I imagine, didn't calm his nerves at all.

I threw on a coat and some shoes, heaved the carrier out the door and down to the sidewalk, trying to move as quickly as possible while toting a 20-pound cat, trying to avoid pedestrians, trying to keep from screaming. Complicating matters still further was the fact that I couldn't find the animal hospital. I knew roughly where it was, I'd been there before, but it was 8 a.m., I was in a state, my 14-year-old cat was on the brink of death (if there's one thing the movies taught me, it's that once you start vomiting blood, you're a goner), and I was running up and down a two-block stretch of a Brooklyn avenue, looking for a sign.

Finally, an old man in a baseball cap leaning on a broom asked, as I passed him for the third time, "You lookin' for the vet?"

I nodded, and he pointed straight up, to the big sign above his head.

Once inside at the counter, sweating badly, only slightly relieved, I continued to hold on to the carrier as I tried to fill out the forms legibly. When I was finished, I sat down with him, and waited.

In the examination room 10 minutes later, the young vet on duty looked him over, took a blood sample, took his temperature, but did no speculating.

"We'll run a couple of X-rays," she said, "to see if they show anything. Given the situation, however, he's going to have to stay here overnight?maybe even two."

I nodded dumbly.

"But before we go any further," she said, "I'll give you an estimate."

"Don't worry about the money," I told her. "The money doesn't matter."

In the back of my head, I was beginning to think that that might've been a foolish thing to say, given that I didn't have pet insurance, but I held my tongue. Then she sent me home, where I called Morgan, and stared at the television, and wept. I always wondered how I would react when faced with something like this. Despite all the shit I'd fumbled through over the years, death had pretty much kept its distance. Grandparents, uncles, acquaintances, maybe, but never anything this close. Nothing that I had lived with, day in, day out, for 14 years.

Those parts of my body that weren't numb, I began to notice, hurt like hell. It took a few hours to realize just how many muscles I had strained while lugging that beast to the vet's office.

Later that afternoon, the doctor called to tell me that the X-rays had revealed a mass in Guy's stomach?but she couldn't tell if it was a foreign object or a tumor. I knew that Guy would never eat a foreign object?hell, he won't even eat the good stuff I offer him?so I began to plan for the inevitable as the doctor began to detail all the things they were going to be doing to him to determine what, exactly, was in his belly. Ultrasounds, endoscopies, exploratory surgery. Before she hung up, she quoted another estimate, which was three times the amount she'd quoted that morning.

They should quote estimates like that in human hospitals, too, just for fun.

Still, I told her it was okay. "Just do what you can."

Then she said, "We'll hope for the best, but prepare for the worst," which is never something you want to hear a doctor say.

I slept only fitfully that night, plagued by dreams of a glowing yellow squirrel I couldn't catch. The next morning I went into work in an effort to distract myself for a few hours. It didn't work.

It may seem crass, but as I sat at my desk, I began to take inventory?last summer, my air conditioner died. Then a few weeks ago, my stereo. Then my computer. And now this. All these things were arriving at a greater and greater frequency. What would be next? I didn't want to think about it.

That afternoon, Morgan and I stopped by the hospital to visit him. When we walked into the room with all the cages, he raised his head, opened his eyes and meeped, then went back to sleep.

"This whole business must seem like an alien abduction to him."

"But one where we can visit, at least."

Morgan noticed that the charts hanging in front of the other cages were covered with little orange stickers that read "WILL BITE." Some had two or three of them. Others had yellow stickers that said "SAVE ALL URINE." Guy had no such stickers. I wouldn't have expected him to?he's among the most congenial beasts I'd ever known, animal or otherwise. Which was what led me to the conclusion that he was retarded.

That afternoon, a new doctor called. What they thought was a tumor turned out to be an ulcer.

This sounded like good news to me, but I was wrong.

"The prognosis is poor, I have to tell you." he said. "He may not make it through the next 24 hours." And instead of a couple of days, they were now going to have to keep him for a couple of weeks?if he made it through the night.

But he did. I began to wonder if Guy, just maybe, was simply too dumb to let go.

We stopped by to visit him every day over the next several days, as his prognosis rollercoastered from "poor" to "hopeful" to simply "we don't know." We sat in the waiting room with dozens of people with dogs, cats and birds?all going through little crises of their own. And in that time, the staff got to know us, and were uniformly kind. They all loved Guy, it seems. Everyone always did. Hell, after he was on 60 Minutes, he got more letters than I did.

But he never let it go to his head.

Monday night, a week after he'd gone in, the doctor called to let me know he could come home the next day, and I got my first good night's sleep in some time.

The next morning, however, the doctor wasn't so sure. Guy'd taken another turn. How in the hell do cats get ulcers, anyway? I suspected it was the result of spending 14 years with my other cat?the smaller, smarter, evil one?that finally got to him. Others speculated that it was the result of spending 14 years with me.

Whatever the cause, on Wednesday Morgan and I were told we could bring him home. He came home, however, with three different medications?each to be taken three times a day, none of which could be taken the same time as any other. And in between administering the medications, we had to feed him as much as possible with a syringe, given as he wasn't eating on his own yet. Plus, I had to bring him back to the vet once a day for a checkup until I was told otherwise.

So, quite suddenly and quite unexpectedly, my little apartment became an ICU, where I was responsible for providing Guy with round-the-clock care.

I found, once again, that I couldn't sleep. And there was no saying when I'd be able to sleep again. This is my life for a while?cramming syringe after syringe of food and medicine into an admittedly good-spirited beast. It's already taken a toll on my fragile sanity, but it's beginning to look like he just might make it.

Goddamn that cat.