An Update

As you can see from my Opal-ish melodramatic post from yesterday, our tiniest Jackson was quite ill. I tossed and turned all night and couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering me, but when I awoke myself at around 5:30, I had a sick feeling in my gut. The cat should have been bothering us all night as he always does, and we usually lock him out of the room at around 3 or 4. But he never came. I looked around the house and finally found him right under our bed, and looking dreadful. I knew instantly that he was sick, and my first instinct was a tummy ache of some sort, but the more I watched, the more I realized it was something much worse than that. His eyes were two different sizes, and it looked as if one side of his face was rather limp. He had a twitch, and it seemed as if his vision and maybe even his coordination was impaired. Having seen a 7 foot tall thoroughbred once do the same thing after sustaining a neurologically damaging injury, I was not comforted by what I saw. I immediately began looking for an emergency vet, and we took him to an animal hospital in Sandy. Essentially, the vet just confirmed what we already feared, that the little monster had a neurological issue which could have been caused by an almost shocking and totally uncomfirmable number of things. He prescribed an anti-inflammatory, and that was all he could really do for us, short of recommending a neurologist and offering multi-million dollar cat tests. I adore my animals, but all of us have our limits, and sadly this was ours.

After a day of ups and downs yesterday, where he seemed to improve, regress, improve, regress; this morning he woke us up full of spunk and sharp claws, and I had never been so relieved to find a cat paw batting my nose at 6 am. He wasn’t exhibiting any symptoms he had the day before, and as far as we can tell he is mostly back to normal. This may mean that he ate something that caused him a temporary bout of misery, or it could mean that he had some sort of seizure. Either way, we’ll be showing as much diligence as we can the next few days, and hoping the scary symptoms don’t return.

That update being out of the way, I have to say that emotionally it was jarring to have mortality briefly rear its ugly head at my perfectly charming life. No offense to Jeoffrey, but he’s sort of the least significant member of the family, and losing him would have left a painful gaping hole in the world that we have built. It was perhaps good to be reminded that mortality is hiding behind each of our bright and lovely pairs of eyes.

Also, the cat spent 10 minutes playing with the full length mirror today. He kept walking around to the back of it, like he was trying to see where the other cat went. I don’t know if this means that the neurological wonkiness made him smarter or dumberer.