Sometimes Love Wins

I’m writing about images and diagnoses and despair, about when we give up and when we don’t, and about two small brown bottles in the snow...

That first time I find them hidden behind bushes in the snow in the dark, in a dingy little industrial park in Woodinville. More than two hours to drive there on snowy roads on a dark Friday evening, because those bottles look like my last chance.

Atl, my friend with the beautiful silky striped fur, Atl who sleeps at my chest with his paw on my cheek, Atl has cancer. Never knew anything ‘til he slowed down and stopped eating one day, and then the x-rays show a white mass all through his body. More cancer than cat, according to the images, but images aren’t the whole truth.

He’s still all cat, I know that.

I long to defy the images, want my love to save him, and I think love alone won’t be enough this time, so I go for the brown bottles.

But here’s the tragic part. Despair and resignation win. I am tired. Tired because it’s January, tired from worrying and crying, tired from mustering up what it takes to stick a needle under his skin and hold him on my lap while saline drips into his poor body. Tired from cruising grocery stores for new flavors of baby food, and force-feeding him anyway because despair has taken hold of him, too.

And mainly, I believe the images.

What can a bottle of brown stuff do against that vicious white mass? How can you win a war when the enemy holds all the territory? I believe the images, and I give up. The bottles sit in my fridge and Atl dies and I bury him in the yard.

*     *     *

For fourteen years I see those bottles, and I push them to the back of the shelf, behind the tortillas and eggs.

 Fourteen years and then… Phoenix. Another guy with the beautiful brown stripes I love. Nowhere near as sweet as Atl, but I love the way he swats my ankle when he wants something. Now Phoenix can’t breathe, makes this awful sound when he tries. We go to eight vets, try four antibiotics and various other things, and along the way he stops eating. We wind up in Pullman with a young, serious, white-coated vet and another ugly set of images.

Images. Something is filling his entire head—no wonder he can’t breathe. Dr. Sellon tells me it’s lymphoma and he has two months to live, and he offers to let me subject my beloved friend to a month of radiation, living in a cage 500 miles from me.

 No.

Then I remember the brown bottles. Drive with Phoenix across the desert, across the mountains, down the driveway, and I open the door to the fridge. I don’t know the dosage for a cat and I don’t know how to get the foul-smelling stuff down his throat, but this time I figure it out.

This time I divide the weight of a human by ten and I round up syringes (no needles) and I wrap Phoenix in a towel and squirt the stuff down his throat. And the sound goes away. He can breathe. He eats and demands to go out and swats my ankle and smirks at me. I keep doing it every day and every day I tell him, “Come on furhead, it’s time to save your life.”

This time two years later, he’s still alive, he’s fine, and all it takes is two of those brown bottles a month.

This time despair doesn’t win.

I shoot a picture of Phoenix asleep on the couch—another image, no ugly white mass, just pretty brown stripes—and I send it to the man in the white coat.  

Hah! Brown stripes win over white masses, love wins over resignation and despair, the man in the white coat was wrong. The cat is all cat.