Good Luck Cat

by Lissa Warren

  Genetic predisposition aside, I believe MS is the disease I was born to have. I’m okay, and I’m okay with having it. What Dad had was scarier, and he never once wallowed, and he never gave up. What Ting had was scarier, and she never once bit us.

  So far I haven’t bitten anyone either.

  Chapter Eighteen

  My Father’s Daughter

  Kind old ladies assure us that cats are often the best judges of character. A cat will always go to a good man, they say.

  —Virginia Woolf

  In my favorite pictures of my father, he has his arms around me. In the first one, taken when I was three or four, he has picked me up and we’re cheek to cheek, bare trees in the background, sunny enough for us to be squinting and warm enough that sweaters sufficed. It was fall on Fire Island, and that’s all that I remember. That, and being happy.

  In the second one, I’m older—nine or ten. We’re in Nags Head, North Carolina, and the ocean is behind us. We’re holding onto a kite for dear life. He’s tan and looks athletic. His left arm is draped around my shoulders. As for me, I look protected. I was protected, always.

  My father and I were very much alike—more alike in temperament than my mother and I. She preferred adventure, while he and I liked to stay home. She craved novelty, while he and I liked routine. Though a very bright woman, her life isn’t in her head the way it is for me, and was for Dad. She needed to do things to be content. Dad and I just needed to think about doing them.

  Unlike me, my father had a less than idyllic childhood. Sure, there was stickball in the streets, and aunts and uncles and cousins for Shabbat, and the roar of Yankee Stadium through open windows on warm summer nights. But his father was emotionally distant, and his mother, whom he adored, died when he was just thirteen. His father remarried a woman with children of her own. She wanted nothing to do with my dad, and he was left to his own devices at an age when he still needed tenderness and guidance. He floundered for several years—went off to college too young (a mere sixteen), then went straight to law school, dropped out and joined the navy, married a woman he barely knew, and got divorced from her soon after. They were tough years for him.

  But my father was resilient. He began a successful career in retail, met and eventually married my mom, had a child (me), and became an involved and nurturing father who made it his life’s mission to expose me to everything he knew, be it comic books or coins, lightning bugs or baseball cards, tropical fish or gefilte fish. I could never get behind the latter, but everything else became part of who I am. What I took away from him most—in addition, of course, to his love of animals—was his optimism and his ability to notice and appreciate kindness, as well as his respect for those who practiced it. My father was a very verbal man; he loved to tell stories. Not all of them had happy endings, but all of them had heroes. And he was, and always will be, mine.

  While there are so many things I love about Ting, things that are unique to her, I’ll admit that, like my father, I’m a sucker for cats in general. Dogs are nice, but their love is given freely. With cats you have to earn it, and I’m a girl who likes a challenge. A cat’s love isn’t earned easily, though. Food won’t do it; neither will catnip. Petting and scratching help, but are wholly insufficient if not accompanied by constancy, consistency, and permanence. A cat knows when she’ll always have you, and that’s when she’ll let you truly know her.

  I like cats so much that I like phrases about them—even ones that don’t really make sense: the cat’s pajamas, cat got your tongue, the cat’s meow, let the cat out of the bag. I like songs with cats in them, especially “Cat’s in the Cradle,” which topped the Billboard charts when I was two, Johnny Cash’s “Mean Eyed Cat,” and, for obvious reasons, The Cure’s “All Cats Are Grey.” I collect little books about kittens and cats, miniature volumes of sayings with line art. The sayings are trite, the line drawings bad—yet they hold a place of esteem on my mantel, buttressed by cat-shaped bookends. I can’t explain it, really. Can’t justify the cat-­covered teacups with the matching dish towels, the beeswax crouching-cat candle, the cat-shaped (God help me) oven mitts, or the cat-shaped cupcake tray. All I can say in my defense is that I. Love. Cats.

  I love cats for their cat-like ways: for the paw draped dramatically over their eyes while they nap their way toward late afternoon. For their ability to become a ball—one that nestles and nuzzles and snores. For their Superman stretches and their head butts to claim you. For how startled they look when they sneeze. For the carpet they claw while wiggling their ass, and the way they twitch while sleep-stalking a sparrow. For their teasey bites and their testy bites, and their incessant need to knead you. For the way that, once you’ve gained their trust, they’ll literally walk all over you in an effort to get to your face to kiss you.

  While I’ve never met a cat I didn’t like, Ting-Pei is obviously special. She’s our good luck cat, and I’ve learned a lot from her. But it was my father who taught me that, if we’d all just spend a little more time looking for our good lucks, we’d see that they surround us. Ting is my daily reminder to look.

  Dad was lucky to have Ting to make his last years happy. Ting was lucky to have skilled doctors who cared about her—skilled doctors who cared about us. Mom and I were lucky to have her to focus on during the worst of our grief, and she was lucky to have us to advocate for her and nurse her back to health. I’m lucky for my forty-one years without MS, a disease that strikes many in their twenties and thirties. And, when the time came, I was lucky to get a quick and accurate diagnosis.

  Now I’m lucky to have Ting to cheer me up when my MS flares, lucky to have her beside me at this moment. But most of all, we’re just lucky that a cat like her exists—that she came into our life and made our life her own.

  Epilogue

  Arise from sleep, old cat,

  And with great yawns and stretchings …

  Amble out for love

  —Kobayashi Issa

  Multiple sclerosis translates to “many scars,” and I suppose we all have them. Most of mine are literal now, black holes forming in my brain. But black holes give rise to galaxies, and I’m open to what this disease has to teach me. Always my father’s daughter, I remain the hopeful Lissa Warren.

  Ask how I am and I’ll say “Good”—or, maybe, “Could be worse.” Could be worse, have been worse, will be worse; all of them would be accurate. Close friends sometimes get “Have been worse,” with a bit of explanation. But “Will be worse” I save for Ting, who’s tough enough to take it—who doesn’t dwell on what’s ahead because, today, there’s sun to bask in.

  If you were to ask me what I like best about MS—which, let it be known, no one ever asks me—I would say it’s how the disease forces you to depend on others. Some people go weeks or months without a reminder of how much they’re loved. I get those reminders daily: every time my mom opens a jar for me because my hands aren’t very useful, every time a friend stands in line at Starbucks to get us tea while I sit at the table and wait. Of course the dependence is also what I like least about MS, and what I fear the most. But there you have it—life in all its messy glory. At least I’m alive to live it.

  MS isn’t cancer. It’s not something you battle or something you fight. To use another military metaphor, MS isn’t a war you win. It’s something to which you acclimate, something you assimilate. They’ll cure it in my lifetime, or they won’t. If they don’t, perhaps through new therapies or new medications, or both, they’ll at least figure out a way to repair the damage done by MS lesions.

  The first time I met him, I asked Dr. Weiner what I could do to improve my chances of living well with this disease. He told me to take my meds and keep a positive attitude. Done and done. Meanwhile, he’s identifying genes associated with MS, while elsewhere on the Brigham and Women’s campus, in a building I’ve probably passed a dozen times, another doctor bathes stem cells in acid, turning them embryonic. Hope.

  Since my diagnosis, Mom has read eight books about MS.
On the whole, she’s doing pretty well. To be there for me, she stays closer to home now, busying herself around the house. She meets cousin Sonya for lunch and a movie. She bought herself an iPad and taught herself to use it. Some days she takes photos of Ting and sends them to me at work. When I travel for my job—which, thankfully, I’m still able to do—we keep in touch via Facetime. Same when she travels to upstate New York to see her best friend from high school, also named Donna. And she tries new recipes, like shrimp and risotto with asparagus (delicious) and cauliflower mashed potatoes (not). On Friday nights, I almost always get takeout from a nearby Mexican place that opened shortly after Dad died, to give Mom a break from cooking. We split an order of chicken fajitas and indulge in chips and salsa. Like the rest of the world, we got hooked on Downton Abbey, and subsequently found our way to other British PBS series, including Mr. Selfridge, which Mom really likes, because she worked in retail.

  We bird-watch. We grow basil. We undercook brownies on purpose and use soup spoons to eat them hot. We appreciate the beautiful ordinary that is our lives. When we make tea for each other and set down the cups, it’s Lissa on the left (because both words start with “L”) and Mom on the right (because Mom’s always right). We laugh when the nurse at the infusion center holds my IV in place with pet wrap.

  I often marvel that Mom hasn’t crumbled, and I’ve come to realize one reason she’s so strong is that my father loved her so much, for so long. When a man gets such a kick out of you—spends forty years just being happy being with you—I guess it gives you the ability to get through anything. Even the loss of him. Even watching the daughter you taught to walk struggle to do so as an adult.

  Ting is nineteen now, and a very happy cat. She’s become quite vocal in her old age, and it seems to be particularly important to her that we know exactly where she is at all times. Consequently, she has developed the habit of announcing herself whenever she enters a room, or even just switches napping spots. So keeping tabs on her is fairly easy.

  We spend our days trying to make things extra nice for her, whether it’s switching on the lamp above her kitty bed when it’s cloudy to make up for the absent sun, or leaving Dad’s robe in the rocking chair for her to snuggle up in. We haven’t washed the robe in the hope that it still smells like him. It doesn’t to us, but a cat’s sense of smell is fourteen times better than a human’s, so maybe.

  The worst thing in Ting’s life these days is her nemesis, the kamikaze cardinal—a mama bird who relentlessly dive-bombs the big window by Ting’s sunroom ledge. We can’t determine whether she’s taunting Ting or whether she’s going after her own reflection but, regardless, Ting will not be happy until that bird is a snack. We’ve done everything we can think of to dissuade the cardinal, and the only thing that has worked even a little bit is to hang silver Christmas ribbon from the top of the window to kind of scare her away—a tip we got from our neighbor, Lyn, who got it from the Audubon Society.

  Even before her surgery, Ting was showing signs of asthma—loud, raspy coughing fits—and Dr. Belden officially diagnosed her with it about two years ago when Mom and I brought her in to be checked after Googling “feline asthma” and coming up with a video of a black cat having the same kind of attacks as Ting.

  At first we just tried getting rid of her (very dusty) scratching post and changing her to a cat litter with less dust—even tried litter made from corn cobs instead of clay. Those things helped a bit, perhaps, but not enough. Then, thinking it might be a bacterial lung infection, Dr. Belden prescribed the antibiotic Clavamox. It didn’t really do the trick either. So now, to lessen the frequency and severity of the attacks, we give Ting two different medications via inhaler twice a day each: a red one (albuterol) and an orange one (Flovent).

  As with the pacemaker, they don’t make special asthma medication for cats, so she uses meds made for humans that we buy at our local drugstore. Both come with counters so that we know how many puffs are left. We administer each dose using a device called an AeroKat—a plastic cylinder about the size of a small water bottle, with a soft rubber face mask at one end and a place to attach the inhaler at the other. Close to the top of the AeroKat there’s a little green lever that moves up and down as Ting breathes. The trick is to press the inhaler exactly when she’s breathing in so that the medicine gets deep into her lungs. It sounds easy, and it is—unless, of course, she’s squirming. On the whole, though, she doesn’t seem to mind it; she just looks at us each time we approach her, chamber in hand, as if to say Again?

  The medicine definitely helps, but Ting still has a half-dozen mild asthma attacks most days, depending on the weather and the pollen count. Although each attack will eventually stop on its own (usually within a minute), we’ve learned that there are things we can do to comfort her and shorten them. So, when she has one, we pick her up and sort of burp her like a baby, or stand her on her hind legs and raise her front paws over her head to stretch her body, or scratch her neck in a downward motion or her chest in an upward one, or offer her a drink of water. One of these approaches has always worked so far, but we have an emergency inhaler handy, just in case. And, if her asthma gets worse, there’s a pill we can start to give her. Dr. Belden has already written the prescription.

  The one downside of the asthma medication is that it makes Ting’s ears paper thin. Consequently, the tips fold over when she sleeps. Fixing them is like trying to separate two rose petals that have gotten stuck together. We start each morning gently rolling out her ears, bringing them back to their full, upright, and locked position. She usually purrs while we do it, happy to have us making a fuss.

  We’ve also started feeding her human baby food. About a year ago she stopped eating the dry cat food on which she grew up, and started losing weight. Dr. Belden feared her appetite was off because her kidney function was declining—a common problem in older cats—and advised us to try to switch her from dry food to wet, in an effort to maximize her fluid intake. We tried everything—from the good stuff (Iams, Eukanuba, Science Diet, Blue Buffalo) to the naughty (Friskies, Whiskas, etc.). After learning they were owned by Mars—the same company that makes Milky Way and Snickers (who wouldn’t want a Milky Way, right?)—I went out and bought some Sheba, including their Premium Cuts variety pack, which, I kid you not, had a Korat on the box. But the Sheba was a no-go.

  You name the brand, we gave it a try, in every available flavor—from beef to turkey, shrimp to rabbit, lamb to liver, cod to tilapia. We tried minced, sliced, and flaked; we tried grilled, we tried roasted. We tried one with “chunky chopped marinated morsels” that we could barely get out of the can. We tried a pâté with aged cheddar that looked so good I was tempted to put it on a Triscuit and eat it myself. We tried vegetarian and Mediterranean, and if we could have found it, we’d have tried Rastafarian. (Speaking of which, I started wondering if we should investigate medical marijuana for Ting after seeing a CBS News report on how it increased the appetite of cancer patients; wasn’t sure how we’d get her to smoke it, though.) We tried vegan, organic, and organic vegan. We tried a kosher kind called Evanger’s, which sounded vaguely evangelical to me, which didn’t make much sense. We even tried the Fancy Feast Elegant Medleys—the names of which made my own mouth water (Chicken Tuscany with Long Grain Rice, Tuna Primavera with Garden Veggies, and the oh-so-­enticing Turkey Florentine)—as well as the Fancy Feast gourmet breakfasts, including the really fancy-sounding Soufflé with Wild Salmon.

  If we could’ve gotten Ting to eat any of it, she would have been eating better than I do. But of course she refused it all—wouldn’t give it a sniff, much less a lick. Exasperated, we emailed Dr. Belden, who promptly suggested we try Beech-Nut or Gerber baby food. Duh. Everything else that had helped her so far had been human—pacemaker, asthma medicine, and so on. Why shouldn’t it be the same with food?

  It took a week and several trips to the market, but we finally found a flavor Ting really liked—Gerber Chicken and Gravy. Months later, by accident (the jars look alike), we
found a second flavor that passed muster—Gerber Turkey and Gravy. The moral of the story: She may be from Thailand, but, like any good American, our cat likes gravy.

  Feeding Ting baby food is actually quite the process. It begins with recognizing the signs she’s hungry: a pleading look, followed by an insistent meow that could charitably be described as a bleating lamb, but more accurately described as a squeezed gnome. That’s our cue to lean down to her and ask, “Do you want baby food?” She almost always answers, and her answer is almost always yes. So we raise a finger in front of her face and say “One minute.”

  Then it’s off to the refrigerator to get the jar of baby food, because Ting refuses to eat it if it’s at room temperature. She also refuses to eat it off a plate, or a dish, or even a silver spoon. So, after walking upstairs while tapping the spoon on the jar lid three times and singing the words bay bee food (we have no idea how this came to be part of the process, but it’s been that way for months), we use the spoon to scoop a blob of the gelatinous stuff into our palm, and then kneel down to her and hold out our hand until she starts to eat from it. Or not.

  When it comes to Ting and baby food, it’s a crapshoot. She usually doesn’t eat it if it’s from a new jar—the flavor is just too strong. But a jar that has been open in the fridge for a couple of days is, to her, absolutely perfect. The only trick is to stay still long enough for Ting to get her fill, because if you move or, God forbid, talk, she’ll stop eating. It’s hard not to laugh when she nears the end of her meal and her tongue starts to tickle your palm. And, of course, we have to be careful not to let the baby food slip through the space between our fingers, which just makes an ungodly mess on the floor—one that Ting has absolutely no interest in helping to clean up.