Last Tuesday Whit had his staples removed and I’m pleased to report that he did very well. In fact, his behavior was fantastic. For him, that is. As you recall, being anywhere outside his home turf appeals to Whit about as much as being put on a rack and tortured. When a diabolical poltergeist knocked his crate off the end of the exam table on which I was holding him and it hit with a crash that caused anyone of any species within earshot to jump, all he did was shoot out of my arms like a cannonball and disappear under the counter that contained a collection of laboratory equipment. Nor did he do anything but give me the hairy eyeball when I got down on my hands and knees and followed him under there. Even better, he did nothing to stop me from extracting him from all the wires and other paraphernalia but the usual–magically transform himself in a cement cat weighing what felt like at least 100 pounds, all of it determined not to budge an inch.
Nonetheless I prevailed and we came home and celebrated with Whit’s new best friend: canned cat food. He ate it while I watched and grinned like an idiot.
I grinned because he was so obviously pleased with himself and also because I’d learned at the clinic that the mass on the half of his thyroid gland that was removed was benign. There’s an old saying that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, but sometimes knowing too much can be a drag too. The day of Whit’s surgery, my friend and the surgeon, Andrea Neiley, left a post-op message on my answering machine letting me know how things went. It contained the usual vet-to-vet verbal shorthand that communicates something without really saying it. The key terms that stuck in my mind included “large,” “lobulated,” “took longer to get out than I thought,” “saved it to send in for histopath if you want.” She didn’t say it and neither did I but we were both thinking the same thing: cancer.
After I requested the tissue be sent in, I tried to put it out of my mind but of course it was always there someplace. Even more so than many people, I’ve been conditioned to give those medical test results a lot of power over me. But I’m also very much aware of the mind-body effect and how my feelings can affect my animals. So for those ten days, I deliberately and not without a certain amount of effort saw Whit as a cat I could visibly see improving every day in numerous ways. Although the big C might have hovered somewhere in the depths of my subconscious thoughts, my conscious ones only acknowledged an increasingly healthy cat.
Which is exactly what he is. If there was any doubt in my mind, the speed and grace with which he flew off the exam table, disappeared under the counter, resisted being dragged out, then purred and ate his way through a dish of food removed it.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” he might have said to me. “I knew I was fine.”
But he didn’t.
And for that, too, I am extremely grateful.