the john wayne kitty blues

SO IT’S LIKE this: Preparing to turn my stalwart four-paws companion of 12 years, my cat, Bug, my pal, the biggest fan of my singing, my eyeball, into a furry glow lamp to fry part of his bedeviling thyroid gland is frying every one of my own nerves as well.

I joke like I think this is somehow funny. I don’t think this is funny. In fact, I think it’s all pretty horrifying.

To be a lot more specific/less hyperbolic here, I’m taking Bug to the N.C. State Veterinary School Hospital in Raleigh early tomorrow, to have him injected with radioactive iodine, which is intended to bind to the corrupting rebel tissue in his thyroid gland, and put his self-devouring metabolism somewhere back into normal range. To where he no longer eats like the bottom-end of a newly flipped hourglass, and yet steadily, steadily loses weight, withering toward the inevitable. To where his kidneys don’t then quit, or his heart does not then give out, assuming his body hasn’t already quite literally starved him to death first.

The radio-iodine injection will also make him a potentially toxic addition to our household for roughly two weeks after, though apparently no danger to himself, or to our other pets. So sez conventional wisdom on the procedure anyway. 

The N.C. State Vet School comes highly recommended in online reviews; in fact, I’ve yet to see anything but good written about it: compassionate vets, knowledgeable, helpful, etc. I’ve also gotten several outstanding personal recommendations on the place, from fellow pet-centric folks. And my own initial visit there about a week ago, to determine if Bug was a realistic candidate for the radio-iodine treatment, suggested all that advance billing was right on the money — in this case, a boatload of money indeed. In fact, that first visit there ranks as the single-best veterinary experience I’ve ever had, anywhere. 

And all of this helps me to maneuver this unwanted situation, a little. Because still, I am abandoning my cat, my pal, my eyeball, who is terrified even of car travel, for a week of mostly protracted isolation an hour-and-a-half away from home, and then another week alone once he returns, in my small office building (a converted toolshed) out back. Not to mention that I’m also having him turned nuclear in the process.

Here again I joke, ha, ha. Ha freaking ha.

Because. Because because. Because, ultimately, Bug is my Fred. And while that means nothing to you, it means everything to me.

 WHEN BUG WAS first diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, our hometown vet began him on a twice-daily regimen of a drug called methimazole, among the sole accepted courses of treatment for the disorder. We went this route primarily because there is no local veterinary clinic that provides the other preferred treatment, the radioactive-iodine injection — and yes, because I was repulsed by the very idea of irradiating Bug to begin with, especially since he gets no vote in the matter. So, methimazole, in a compounded solution, applied inside his ears, for absorption through the skin. No pills. No daily kitty chasings and stand-offs, cornerings, trappings, hissings, etc. Easy-peasy.

Except. 

Except that the pudding-like gunk nearly killed Bug. Seriously. Nearly killed him. He began getting sick about a week into it, to a degree I was not at first even aware. We are, you see, a trained pet family, so everyone cleaned up any messes that were stumbled upon, never thinking to communicate the extent of tidying-up, and thus never realizing there was a really ugly pattern at play.

After what turned out to be the third day of Bug vomiting excessively — once he started, he’d make it a few feet, then vomit again; several rooms in our house became minefields of upchucked water and kitty stomach acid — the bigger picture came into ugly focus. I looked up the medication, as I maybe should have done to begin with, wondering if it might be the culprit, yet all the while fearing this instead could be the rapid onset of kidney failure, which often accompanies untreated hyperthyroidism in cats. 

What I read about methimazole filled me with all manner of unease, as reading about pretty much any medication will, when you get down to the potential side-effects. Especially because Bug was right then experiencing many of the worst of them, all at once. 

On that Saturday morning when I put two and two together, and finally had the sense to go into a four-alarm panic, I rushed Bug to the emergency vet’s office to find that he was not only severely dehydrated, but also in pain all over his body. His skin was inflamed. He could barely keep his head up, he was so weak. He could barely get a meow out. He was just shy of going into shock.

He was, it turned out, having a severe systemic reaction to the medication, so profound that I have to question my competency as a pet owner for not recognizing the gravity of the situation sooner. It is only of minor comfort to know that his passing due to my unwitting negligence would likely have killed me, too.

He is, as I said, my Fred.

SO THEN, FRED. When I was a teenager, my family had a cat who had come to us after deciding he preferred our house to that of our neighbors, his original owners. Before his too-early demise, Fred, as he showed up already named, turned my dad — a retired-military, Depression-era, grew-up-living-by-his-wits/sometimes-homeless, first-generation-American, class-A-crotchety grumble of a man — from not being a pet guy into a full-on four-paws True Believer. Fred was so like a dog at times, in his blatant glad-to-see-ya’s, his head-butting demands of personal attention. He was also phenomenally cool, and by that I do not mean, y’know, cat-acteristically aloof. He was so James- Dean-as-kitty cool, in fact, that he ultimately became as much a, well, category for me as he was a cat.

The puns are bad, yes; the point is a very good one indeed: There are pets, all invaluable in their individual ways. And then, even beyond that, there are Freds.

My black-bear-in-a-grizzly’s-clothing old man would sit in his then-new blue chair rubbing the long white, black and brown kitty behind the ears, for what seems now like hours at a time, though it was probably just minutes, of course; time thankfully distends the best memories right along with the bad ones. And over time, Frank Sr.’s face would steadily fall upward, into a smile. If I am remembering this at all wrong, I don’t care. Because I have grown incredibly fond of this memory. So, truth it is.

And this truth had its own ritual: My dad and Fred would watch football together, drink a beer and eat salted peanuts. Though mostly, my dad did all of those things, with lanky Fred perched contentedly on F. Sr.’s knees, eyes at half-mast, and purring. Loudly.

When Fred died, skinny as a rail — I wonder now if he maybe also had hypothyroidism, which chills me — my father stood in his back yard, beside the hole I had just dug, and he wept, he just stood there and wept. I had never seen him do that before. Nothing ever even close to that. 

Since then, yes, because he came to adore one pet after another, most of them dogs, sweet, goofy golden retrievers. And all of them Freds.

Bug is my Fred. Though not my first, and surely not my last. But he is my Fred.

OUR GOOD FRIEND Jean calls Bug “John Wayne Kitty,” because of his loping gait, and in deference to the size difference between him and our other three cats; in fact, we often go with “Big Guy” or “Big Kitty,” sometimes just “Bigs.” Because Bug is damn large. Or was. His out-of-control thyroid gland has caused him to shed several pounds this past year — you could never see his ribs before — even as his appetite skyrockets. If he catches you looking at him as he sits in the vicinity of the communal kitty food bowl, he will begin his begging ritual, meows of very obvious meaning: Feed me, Frank. Feed me, Taylor. Feed me, Lisa. And we do; we all do. He gets whatever, whenever.

Because he’s the Big Kitty. John Wayne Kitty. My Fred.

I think often lately of my first introduction to this amazing creature. It was early 2001, and I had been called out on a Sunday when I was off work from The Virginian-Pilot in Elizabeth City, to cover a flood a little over an hour away, in Ahoskie. So, after marching around the edge of the floodwaters, talking to this local official and that upset resident, I went back to the little Ford truck I had in those days, which I had left, I only later discovered, in the parking lot of a veterinary clinic, about two blocks beyond the flooding. Mine was by then the last vehicle in the lot, and when I opened my driver’s side door, a tiny white-and-black head poked out from underneath, right there at my feet. And the wet ball of fur looked up at me, looked me right in the eyes. And mewed.

So, you see, I obviously had no choice … 

This tiny cat slept beside me as I cranked out a story on my laptop in my truck, and continued sleeping while I ran into the only place I could find with available Internet access (no Wi-Fi in those days; the horror), so I could file the piece. Then, on my drive back home, the kitten scaled the seat beside me, settling in curved around my neck, like a living stole. He then promptly purred himself back to sleep.

I explained all this to my now-ex wife, my first wife, my still-good-friend, Tracey, when I called her on the way home, sleeping animal arced around my neck. She didn’t even seem to blink; bring him, she said. What’s one more? We had two terrific cats already. Bless her. 

The kitten was still slumbered-out in the same spot when I pulled into my driveway.

Said tiny animal obviously got big. Very big. That used to be the first thing you noticed about Bug, his size, and his length; he was like a small domesticated tiger in black and white. The second thing was just how very cool he was, with squinted eyes, an ever-present half-smile of an expression, that loping cheetah gait. And so like a dog in his affections.

Very much a Fred of a cat.

IN THE YEARS since finding him/him finding me, the road got bumpy for me for a while. Really frigging bumpy. Health issues (my back went, and never quite came back, surgery be damned). Family issues (a beloved sibling’s very scary own health issues). Marriage issues (which became divorce issues). Financial issues (stemming from geographical uprooting/under-employment issues, stemming from divorce issues). Get-out-of-bed issues (stemming from all of the aforementioned issues, at once). Issues issues. I’m not comfortable even now thinking about how bad it got for a while. Glad to still be here. 

To wit, written in late summer 2004: 

these dog days

i don’t know
anymore but the cracks
the cracks, and these two cats
have to be fed

some days, other
days I cut myself, careless, see red
rings, circles, years, and the frightened
black one mews i need, i need

nights, there are things eating
in me, of, thorugh me
i don’t know where
and the black-and-white one, the boy

circles my face with his tai
stretches, fur belly up, a something
smile I can sense, in stray window light, can see
his paws touch the air

 At our worst of times, we find ourselves leaning on whatever’s there that will still hold us up. In my case, it turned out often to be roughly 15 pounds of dog-like white-and-black cat.

I RECOGNIZE THAT, no matter, many folks simply don’t get the whole pet thing. I doubt, if you’ve read this far, that you’re one of them.

A dog, I have often heard it said, is something you just leave out in the yard. A cat’s only value is to go after mice, and beyond that, is little better than the vermin it kills.

I’ve actually witnessed the latter view taken to deplorable extremes. Once, as a reporter in Elizabeth City, I overheard two elected city-government officials laughing it up, even knowing I was right there, about how when they were kids, they’d take newborn kittens and hurl them at the sides of buildings, delighted to see the tiny bodies smash, the blood stain the walls, yuk-yuk-yuk, ha, ha, ha. Afterward, I still had to report on these two dirtbags as if they were human beings.

That is gross extreme, of course, an aberration, mostly, of human behavior; I include it here only because, in light of my current circumstances, it offends me even that much more. And while I do not believe in the concept of hell, for people like those two, I try sometimes to let myself do so anyway. 

There are also those people, invariably my fellow men, literally, men, who are inclined to say: Why would you, a guy, ever want a cat? Wrong animal, they say, ha, ha. To which I always want to respond: So, too, are you, bub. The wrong animal, that is. Ha, ha.

I am not partisan, you see. A great pet is a great pet; a terrific companion is a terrific companion. Our house is home to six pets total, all foundlings, all loved like blazes; two are dogs, and four are cats, including one Big Kitty. One big Fred of a kitty.

So for those of you out there who don’t get it, to whatever degree shy of my own blathering pet-centricity, fine, I say, fine. Continue living in your far uglier worlds, where hair doesn’t amass into tumbleweeds in every corner of the house and soggy blobs of the regurgitated stuff don’t surprise your bare feet in the wee hours as you navigate the bedroom in the dark, bound for the bathroom. Where hissing wars and rocketing-paws after-midnight kitty Olympics don’t spring up out of nowhere, scaring you straight from the depths of sleep, to bolt-upright in bed. Where wild beagle howls from downstairs don’t abruptly fill the same wee hours, prompted by thunder or temporary power outages, or the vicissitudes of who the hell knows what, and once more rattle you past the point of again finding sleep that night. Where little red dogs who think your soundly sleeping darling spouse, Lisa, walks on water begin twitching violently in the night from dreams of whatever little red dogs chance to dream, kicking you in your sides; yet again, you are suddenly awake, why, oh, Lord, why?

Because, you non-pet people, you poor souls, you don’t get the other stuff, either. The unabashed devotion that can melt certain too-cynical full-grown men into masses of damp-eyed gratefulness. The crazed hound-dog tongue-baths of “Oh, boy! Oh, boy! Oh, boy!” that erupt out of simply saying, “You are such a good girl!” The Big Kitty head-butts, and kneadings of chest and too, alas, kneadable belly. The contented little-red-dog crowdings up against neck and side as you contemplate each morning putting feet to floor to start your day. The blissed-out kitty bathing of hair, your own (which you strongly suspect will later end up part of hairballs you will then clean up). The resounding purrs of acknowledgment that nothing, nothing, nothing in this world right now could be better than you. You fragile human, you.

My animals are an outsized part of my joy in the everyday, especially on otherwise utterly dissatisfying everydays. And Bug? Bug is my Fred; he is my Fred. When he leaves this world, my own world will be so very much less a joyful place.

Just not now, oh, please, not now. Not yet.

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