Гвен Купер - Homer - The Ninth Life Of A Blind Wonder Cat

The next morning, Homer was almost miraculously back to his old self. He ate a big breakfast and greeted Clayton and Fanny in his usual imperious way. A couple of hours later we were playing one of his favorite games, wherein I would wriggle my finger under the bed covers and Homer (who could once again get on and off the bed just fine) would pounce on them. I was delighted to see him cocking his head to one side in familiar fashion as he listened for the slight noises that would pinpoint where, exactly, my fingers were.

He was still doing well enough when noon came around that Laurence and I went out to grab a quick lunch at a sandwich place next to our apartment building. We’d just placed our orders when my cell phone rang with a call from the animal hospital. The vet who called wasn’t the one who had seen Homer yesterday, but she assured me that she’d thoroughly read both Homer’s test results and his medical file.

“How’s he doing today?” she asked.

“He seems okay, actually.” I’d risen and was walking through the restaurant, so we could continue the call outside where I wouldn’t disturb the diners around me. “He was even playing this morning.”

She sounded surprised. “He was playing ?”

I think I mistook her surprise for reproach—as if she were implying that I was a dangerous lunatic for running an invalid cat like Homer around—and I quickly backtracked. “It wasn’t strenuous play. He was in a playful mood, is what I meant.”

“No, that’s good!” She seemed to file this tidbit away for future reference before continuing. “So I’ve looked over the bloodwork and Homer’s file, and I wanted to go over the results with you.”

She started with the numbers that fell within the normal range and therefore looked good, and that was the shortest part of our conversation. The problem, it quickly became clear, was Homer’s liver. I didn’t have to understand all the ins and outs or medical jargon to know immediately how serious the problem was. Doing some rapid calculations, I realized that Homer’s liver values (the enzymes that were supposed to be found in the liver itself, not in his bloodstream) were about fifteen hundred percent higher than what was normal in a cat. Fifteen hundred percent! “If his fur wasn’t so black, you’d probably have noticed a while ago that his ears are yellow, and how jaundiced he is,” the vet told me, and I cursed myself for having been so stupid—so unforgivably stupid and unobservant. “I sounded surprised when you said Homer was playing this morning, because frankly a cat with numbers like these shouldn’t even be able to walk.” She didn’t say it aloud, but I knew what she was thinking: He shouldn’t even be alive.

My mind instantly rejected that thought. Numbers or no numbers, anybody with two eyes in their head could see that Homer was still Homer . He ate, he played, he cuddled in my lap. Maybe on paper he shouldn’t be alive, but in the real world he was still walking around the same as ever—and where there was life, there was hope. So I took a deep breath to steady myself and asked, “Where do we go from here?”

“I’d like you to bring Homer in this afternoon,” the vet said, “and plan on leaving him here for a few days—maybe a week.” She launched into her recommended course of treatment, an aggressive one that would involve hooking Homer up round-the-clock to various drips and medications, which would drain harmful fluids out and introduce healthier ones in, and give his liver a fighting chance to recover.

I didn’t even know I’d started to cry until I became aware of a pain on my cheeks, and realized that the icy December wind had frozen the tears to my face. My god, was all I could think. My god, how can I do this to him? How can I bring him back to that place and leave him there all alone?

“Let me talk to the doctor who saw Homer yesterday,” the vet concluded. “I’ll call you back so we can make a plan.”

Laurence was waiting at our table when I re-entered the restaurant, and I saw that our food had arrived in my absence. I couldn’t touch mine, however, and as I relayed to Laurence the substance of my conversation with the vet, my tears began to flow in earnest. He reached across the table to cover my hand with his and tried to say something comforting. I suddenly became aware that we were in a very public place, and that the other patrons closest to us were beginning to take an interest in our table. “I’m sorry,” I said, and my voice sounded like I was choking. “I have to go back outside. People will think you’re breaking up with me.” I got up and left him for a second time, crouching once I’d reached the sidewalk again and putting my head between my legs as I tried to pull myself together.

I was still outside, grateful for the cold air I inhaled in greedy gulps in the hopes it would clear my thoughts, when the vet called back. “I spoke with the doctor who saw Homer yesterday,” she told me. “We talked a bit and…” She hesitated, as if searching for the right words. “We’re not sure that Homer would benefit from a hospital environment.”

For a moment, I was hopeful. “You mean you think I can treat him at home?”

Her voice softened. “Look, the doctor you saw yesterday told me what happened. We can’t get near Homer without sedating him, and we can’t keep a cat fully sedated for days at a time. And we can’t sedate a cat at all with bloodwork like Homer’s. If we’d known how bad his numbers were, we wouldn’t have sedated him yesterday.”

“So you’re saying you can’t treat him without sedating him, but you can’t sedate him until you’ve been able to treat him.”

“That’s about it,” the vet agreed. “The thing is, even the really mean cats, when they have numbers like these, are usually so sick and weak that we can do whatever we need to with them. I don’t know how much longer Homer’s strength can last—it’s a miracle that it’s lasted this long—but as long as it does, there’s really nothing to be gained by you bringing him back here.”

She was, as I would later recount at innumerable shelter readings whenever I told this story, saying to me in the nicest possible way, Please don’t ever bring your demon cat back to our animal hospital again. I couldn’t argue. I was no more anxious to bring Homer back than they were to have him.

“Is there anything I can do for him by myself?”

“I’m going to write you a couple of prescriptions,” she said. “Some medication to support his liver and other functions. There’s a pharmacy uptown that can compound it with something yummy-tasting like chicken or tuna. That way you can just squirt it into his mouth or mix it with his food, instead of trying to pill him. It’s a two-week course of treatment.”

My voice cracked when I spoke again, dreading the answer even before I asked the question. “What do we do for him when the two weeks are up?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and the sorrow in her voice was genuine. “But Homer’s numbers are incompatible with life . ”

It was an awful phrase, incompatible with life —at once so brutal yet efficiently descriptive that it told the whole story. So it seemed almost superfluous when she went on to add:

“I don’t think he has more than two weeks left.”

AS A KINDNESS to my fellow sensitive readers (and I’m assuming that applies to most of you reading this), I’ll risk ruining the suspense and tell you up front that we did not lose Homer within the next two weeks. Nor did we lose him within four weeks, or even four months. Homer, as it turned out, had more fight left in him than even those of us who knew him best (and had seen him at his worst) thought he was capable of. In the end, he would stay with us for the better part of the next year.