The Good With The Bad

Had a fabulous day in the spring sun yesterday. Met Dan for a walk and a coffee, had lunch outside at the Easter market (salmon smoked over a fire on-site) with a weiss beer, picked up the kids and a friend on their last day of school before spring break, and stopped for the first ice cream of the season on the way home. Liam's mom Daniela came over to cook dinner as her place is too small for all of us. I was making a fruit salad when Greta walked in.

"Khanie ate some wax." What wax? Did anyone SEE him eat the wax? I found him in a corner of the kids' room panting with his mouth open and his eyes lolling in a most distressing way. Four pm on a Friday afternoon. In my mind I've got one hour to get him in somewhere to be taken care of before the weekend. We start combing the phone book for the vet I see everyday on my walk to the SBahn. Because, of course, we don't have a car and need to find a vet that we can carry the 16 pound cat to. Three phone calls later we find that office isn't opening until five (pm!), but would take us at 4:30 due to the entreaties of Daniela.

The vet takes his xray and shows us what a normal cat abdomen looks like before showing us Khan's. His lungs had about a third of the space of a normal cat. Taking all the space is his chest cavity was one of three things: a tumor, heart failure causing fluid to fill the lungs, or his lower organs on account of a tear in his diaphragm. The first two would mean death; the third was our best case scenario. He calls a heart surgeon specialist who's about to close and gets them to stay open for us. He's in Spandau.



By this point all of the kids have gone home with Dan & Daniela for dinner and a movie. I get to take the taxi to Spandau. I'm thinking of Spike's last day just seven months ago. Why am I the one who takes the life or death trips alone? Because I want to. Because I don't want to entertain kids for hours in waiting rooms but couldn't bear staying home with them and waiting for Dan to call with updates. Because I think women might be hard wired to handle end of life better than men. I was just talking with my mom about this on Thursday. She noticed that the room full of people meeting to discuss the end of life care for her mother was all female. I posited that because we bring life into the world, women are better able to see life out as well. You hope to high heaven that you don't have to see out the same life you bring in, but rather our very ability to do the one enables us to do the other.



The surgeon took another xray from a different angle and still couldn't tell what was going on inside. "We need to see inside. If we do nothing, he will die." And so he was rushed off to the operating room, and I sat in the waiting room with a cup of cold coffee and various brochures for pet taxi services and dog training. Thirty minutes later the nurse came out to tell me it was a torn diaphragm and the surgeon was in the process of repairing it. I lost it. Hugging is not done here with strangers, but too damn bad.  Another thirty minutes and he was in a recovery cage with a heat lamp.  I stood there for over an hour petting him and staring at his stitched up bald belly while we waited for the anesthesia to wear off.  He looked so long, but not so fat as I thought.  Sure enough, they performed a little liposuction while they had him open--could we all be so lucky!  Eventually he was deemed fit for transport, and I paid my 700 euro and got a cab back home.

The kids had the expected response.  Tears at dinner from Greta.  Tears at bedtime from Emery.  Khan spent most of the night on his pillow on our bed.  Not a restful night as his recovery from anesthesia made him flop around attempting to get moving again.  Eventually we gave up on the bed and settled him on the floor near his litter box, where he wouldn't have so far to fall from his thrashing.  This morning he can move around the house a bit.  We're off to the vet in an hour for another shot of pain meds and antibiotics.  The best pet I've ever had has lived to see another day.  We got lucky.