Leave the Kitten Alone!

Camille, meela, milyoshka, cato, cato loca, kitten, ka-mitten, lucy long-legs, stinker, patooter-tat. Anything but cat. The names I give her are manifold, superfluous – and lets face it – to her, irrelevant.

I did not want a cat. Michelle knew this, and we had a disagreement on our hands – one that seemed like I was winning, since we still didn’t have a cat. Then one night, returning from her mother’s, she carried in a large box, a guilty look on her face, and a story to tell. This will fit my theme of the day: the impressions I have of myself get corrected with a swift kick to the ego...because I immediately fell in love with the kitten.

Michelle was a great storyteller. In this tale, she and her mother saw the van careening away; they investigated the overgrown yard of a deserted home and found 3 abandoned kittens – all of which they were able to catch. Michelle took one, her mother’s neighbor offered to take another; the third was passed on to the relative of a friend of her mother’s boyfriend. I had to question the feral theory when the kitten took to the litter-box immediately, and I appended her storytelling with a “she stole her out of a neighbor’s yard because she was that adorable.” And she was: diminutive, skinny, soft white fur with tan and black markings. Her colors have sharpened with age, but she still has her blue eyes, pink nose, and two enormous bat-like ears. The ears are her most irresistible trait – a fleshy, orange-ish color that makes them look like caramel kisses, yet when the sunlight hits her from behind, become translucent.

Camille was named after a Prince song-writing pseudonym. It was a pretty immediate concession made by Michelle, a nod to my being so understanding to her bold move. I wanted to pay homage to the part of Prince that wrote Housequake, U Got the Look, If I Was Your Girlfriend – the entire freaking Black Album – Prince at his most playful and irreverent. It was perfect for my little Calico & Siamese mix, the right amount of precociousness and aloofness that earned her the tag ‘saucy’ from her first encounter with a veterinarian.

This would be her most amicable vet encounter and the least stressful for either one of us. There’s the time she decided to eat yarn, something that prompted x-rays and required intravenous hydration before the offending item passed quite naturally – leaving us to wonder if we’d unnecessarily spent 300 dollars. Or when she developed a urinary tract infection: we hemmed and hawed, thought we should wait it out – but simply could not go to sleep comfortably - knowing she wasn’t feeling well. This resulted in a midnight emergency room trip for what turned out to be a rather benign problem, and we learned another financial lesson in rapidly escalating when the kitten showed any signs out of the normal. Which can be difficult, if you know cats: they go through spells and behavior that make you think they aren’t right in the head.

There’s also the time I fractured her pelvis. I had just come from putting Michelle on a plane to Osaka, Japan; while out south I hit a bucket of golf balls and picked up a couple pieces of furniture from IKEA. I was going to get as much of the bathroom redone as I could before she returned, and after all the running of errands, I entered through the back door with a large, 40 pound, tombstone shaped box – which I stupidly left upright – and a raging full bladder. Even after going to the bathroom, I’d forgotten about the box…until I heard a sharp slam and the cutting combination of Camille screaming and growling at once. I’d just as soon not hear an animal in pain like that for the rest of my life.

I managed one office visit on my own, where they called it muscular pain and prescribed anabolic steroids. Michelle wasn’t satisfied with this – rightfully so – and we had her x-rayed again. There was definitely a fracture. We took Camille to a surgeon, who gave us two scenarios: go in and fix it – which would cost about ten grand – or put her on 5 weeks of cage rest and risk her not being able to jump around a lot in her later years and the possibility she might need surgery anyways. We opted for the second, knowing we would second-guess the decision for the rest of her life. On the other hand, Camille was attended to, hand and foot, for a long time.

Or recently: Camille developed an abscess on her scenting gland. This resulted in her having to wear ‘the collar’, eat soft foods, have a drain installed that was basically a rubber tube running underneath the stitches to release ooze down her hind quarter. I had to hold a warm compress to her behind for ten minutes in the morning and ten minutes in the evening. I had to constantly reconfigure her plate of food because she would push it away from her with that damned collar. There were numerous vet visits; always the scare when such a tiny animal is put under anesthesia – but I really didn’t mind being housebound for a couple weeks to take care of her. Mostly, I was concerned this degree of familiarity, and indignity for her, was going to result in her loathing me.

I don’t know exactly what to call the instinct that kicked in from day one. I dote over her. I treat her as though her 7 pounds are fragile. I talk to her in a raised voice that would embarrass me to no end if someone caught me doing it. I treat her like a person. I fuss over her. I take her into consideration when making plans. I’m anxious when I come home at night for fear that someone has broken into the house and let out Camille. I worry that one of the pine trees in the back yard will fall on the house and she’ll get hurt again. I watch her reaction when I introduce people to her to get the final word on whether they’re all right or not. Is it maternal? Is she the child I never had, and that’s why she’s so precious to me? Probably; I’m not too embarrassed about it. If anything, the positive feeling of caring this much – even about an animal – is something I want to feel good about.

Michelle acknowledged this when we split up. It was strange; there was no question about who was keeping Camille.

My kitten is about 9 years old now: in her 60’s, people-wise. It’s a scary thought. Her character has mellowed out since the abscess, when we were thrown together to be a little too close. Since that last episode, she’s been less aloof - downright clingy with me. She cleans herself less – we used to joke how she had to spend an hour cleaning the ‘human stench’ from her if you so much as pet her. She just doesn’t do that anymore. It’s as though some differentiation between her and I was lost, and she accepts being a closer part of me. It’s a nice feeling.