lilmissnever

Today I read that our bodies now have an extra organ. Obviously, no new organs have snuck into our bodies in the middle of the night. Sometimes what was always there is just classified as an organ now. It's funny to think that you know the human body and then oops, science intervenes, and suddenly you don't. You have a mesentery somewhere in your digestive system and researchers aren't even sure what it does.

2016 felt a little like discovering there a new and mysterious organ in my body and that organ has cancer. I am not young, my few remaining readers. I have a career (I got a very fancy promotion in 2016) in which I am a respected expert rather than an international bright young thing. I have a house (or, as one much-younger visitor pointed out during my holiday Christmas party "she has a house that matches her apron"). I am reasonably competent at my demanding hobby. I speak authoritatively on a number of subject unrelated to my work. I travel the world. Indeed, I travel the world so much that I am recognized by the security guy at the International terminal at SFO. I have a happy life with J and our cats.

While 2016 was busy trying to kill as much of my childhood as possible (David Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Carrie Fisher, Prince) that's what I did. I ran down a giant sand dune in Namibia when J and I trekked across the country for two weeks. We saw a significant percentage of the world's wild roaming Black Rhinos (one) and endless number of desert-adapted elephants and a lioness stalked us. I touched a cheetah's paw--the cheetah was passed out. I flew to Chicago to go to dinner. J and I went to London to see Lush play. I was in Thailand when the King died. I released malware research and took on a post-Soviet government. I got drunk with a guy who used to tour with Bowie in a Doha hotel bar. I sat for my painter in Berlin and she made me into watercolors.

But Brexit and the US election gutted me. You think you know the world as well as you know your body. You think you know what all of your organs are. But suddenly you have a mesentery and it's come down with Stage IV Fascism. I am lucky because it is my job to fight and I will not have to spend any time worrying that I am not doing enough. And I'm unlucky because for ten hours a day, five days a week, I cannot escape what is happening.

So while everyone is resolving to eat better or lose weight, drink less or relax more, I am resolved that in 2017 I will fight like hell. This year is going to kill my cat and break my heart and destroy democracy as we know it. 2017 can come at me. I've got a broken bottle in my hand and I am ready.

I may be tempting fate, posting this with a day left to go, but 2016 has not yet killed my cat. Perl is fifteen years old. She is a frail and skinny thing. The last time I weighed her, she was 6.6 lbs. She has cataracts in both eyes and she moves slowly because she has arthritis. When she started losing weight very quickly this year, the vet diagnosed her with hyperthyroidism, which meant pilling the cat every day. In October, she stopped eating and started vomiting, which having developed a strong sensitivity to old cat problems after Ada, led to another trip to the vet.

Perl hates the vet. She gets carsick. She makes a sound like a baby being stabbed the entire time she is in the car. It is the most piteous wail. J and I have spent a lot of time at the vet in 2016.

It turned out that Perl was exhibiting the symptoms of either irritable bowel disease or a very low grade cancer, both of which are treated with steroids. After a couple of days in the Very Expensive Pet Loft, getting stabilized, we brought Perl home and added steroids to regimen. At this point, Perl required four pills a day. J and I got very good at pilling the cat.

Perl perked up, but she didn't quite recover. After a few weeks, she stopped eating. She just curled up on the same spot on the bed day after day and turned her nose up at the many kinds of food I brought her. Eventually, she could not get up to pee and I had to change all of the bedsheets. When she could no longer use her hind legs, we took her to the emergency vet, who kept her overnight again. It turns out that the steroids were making Perl diabetic. My tiny cat's blood sugar was so low that if we had waited until the next day to bring her in, she would have died.

Around this time we started having to inject our cat with vitamin B12 once a week.

On Christmas, J and I took Perl to the vet for her a recheck. We noticed that her recovery was a little shaky, but we thought it was just a matter of finding the right balance in her medications. Instead, the vet did a set of initial tests and then called us into the an examination room, looking grim. Perl was anemic--and not just a little bit anemic, but so crazily anemic that if she did not resume producing red blood cells, she would need a transfusion.

This is fine. This is fine. How much does a transfusion cost? $600? This is fine. We have already established that we are the sort of people who will set a mountain of money on fire to keep our cat alive. But it won't solve the problem? It's a temporary measure? It buys us time? By which you mean a couple of weeks. Oh.

Oh.

Oh.

But in the meantime, here is the saline for the subcutaneous fluids you're going to give her and needles for the very small amount of insulin she needs, because she is borderline diabetic. Stop her thyroid medication. Give her more steroids. Your cat is a bag of bones, held together with pills and needles and your checkbook.

My few remaining readers, there may have been some crying at this juncture. J and I went home and I put away towels and wailed. Cat lives are short and human lives are long, but J and I have had Perl for longer than I've been writing here. And this feeling is not new--Ada died slowly and expensively and all of her organs failed at once--but it is different when you know the time is coming and all that you can do is make her comfortable before she runs out of life.

This evening I got a call from the vet, who informed me of the results of the more detailed tests they ran on Perl's blood. It turns out that she is not quite as anemic as the quick test had indicated and she appears to still be making more red blood cells. J and I have given her subcutaneous fluids and fed her her steroids, but we haven't quite figured out how to give her a half dose of insulin because the syringes we have aren't small enough. Perl will die, but this is one sliver of misery I will not lay at 2016's feet.

Some things we save for next year.