The Quality of Life

MEDFORD

June 2013

I am sitting on the floor in my kitchen, leaning on one forearm with the other outstretched, trying to coax my cat Peanut to eat bits of tunafish from my finger tips.

We just got home from one of his chemo treatments about an hour ago. The vet tech told me that if he won’t eat within a couple of hours, then I have to call. If he won’t eat, he’ll have to go back. He hates leaving the house. Leaving the house is, for him, the worst part of having cancer.

There was a time when Peanut would walk right into his carrier, but since the vet appointments have grown closer together and more invasive we have to force him. I have mastered this by now, but the first time he fought me turned into a half an hour of struggling. It was summer in our third-floor apartment. I was sweating and growing sweatier as I chased him, grabbed him, tried and failed to get him in the carrier. Peanut is a huge orange tomcat, like Maurice the Cat or Garfield, and I am not skilled in cat-grappling. Every time I tried to thrust him in he’d somehow manage to straight-arm the entryway and knock the carrier back. After perhaps ten attempts, including a couple in which I stood the carrier on end and tried to lower him in, I gave up.

Shit.

Then I remembered that I am stronger than him. I just had to anchor the damned thing so he couldn’t push it away.

I grabbed him, forced him in, and then paced the apartment. I was out of breath, kind of weeping, soaked with sweat, and coated in cat hair. It was in my eyes, up my nose, and in my mouth. I removed as much as I could, and took Peanut to the damned vet.

In May, after Peanut’s regular checkup, there were concerns about his liver. Friday before Memorial Day, we took him in for an ultrasound. The anesthesia from that procedure almost killed him. A vet hospital in Woburn saved his life, and after the holiday weekend, both our vet and the hospital told us that Peanut had lymphoma.

I was not the primary cat parent. That was Tim. He took care of all the near-death drama while I waited at home. But cat oncology appointments can only be made on weekdays during regular work hours. Because it was summer, and as an adjunct academic I was “off work,” that left me to do the primary cat parenting. (In truth, I was unemployed in the summer, or rather ungainfully self-employed. I was embroiled in the process of patching significant research holes in my recently-rejected article on intimacy in Middlemarch — a novel that is very well covered by scholars already — and along with that imbroglio, I was fiercely battling the return of my depression.)

Though Tim found Peanut as a kitten in Evanston, Illinois five years before I’d met them, and though Peanut was there for Tim through years of upheaval, and though Tim took care of Peanut day after day while I explored the various depths of my woe and self-involvement, it was I who went with Peanut to find out how much time he had left, and how he was supposed to spend it.

Peanut’s lymphoma is particularly aggressive, the cat oncologist told me. His life expectancy is very short, with or without chemotherapy. I listened as well as I could, trying to make sense of our three complex treatment options so that I could confer with Tim over the phone.

Option number one: chemo at the veterinary hospital every single week for the rest of Peanut’s life. Option number two: chemo at the veterinary hospital every three weeks, plus meds, for the rest of Peanut’s life. Option number three: no chemo, some meds, and occasional checkups at the vet hospital for the rest of Peanut’s life. Testing on dogs has indicated that option number one prolongs life longer than option number two, and option number two longer than option number three. But no matter what we do, this cancer is going to kill Peanut in nine months or less.

We chose the second option because the third didn’t seem enough like trying.

The name of the game is Quality of Life. As we side-stepped the omnipresent anxiety, pain, and nausea of weekly car rides to invasive chemo, our task was to maintain Peanut’s quality of life through a combination of vet visits, feeding, medication, and observation. And most of the time, it was just me. He needs his medication about an hour after we get home from the vet, and he needs to take it with food. But the vet, the car ride, and the medicine make him too stressed and nauseous to eat. And a cat’s failure to eat can become life-threatening very quickly. Hence, if Peanut doesn’t eat within a couple of hours, back to the vet he must go.

So Peanut and I enter into a precarious dance. We come home. He is very stressed, so I let him calm down. He hides under the bed.  I learn to gently call his name to coax him out of hiding. I learn that tuna is his comfort food.

Down here on the kitchen floor, I have bits of tuna on every finger. There are bits of tuna scattered on the floor between us.

“Please, Peanut. Eat some tuna.”

He sniffs it. He licks a few bits from my fingers. I pull the dish forward and he sniffs it. He recoils a little, nauseous. Then he inches his nose toward the bowl again. He licks a bit of tuna juice. He has a bite. Another. He’s eating.

At last, I wipe away the tears and snot that have been running down my face and I collapse onto the floor. He’s eating. He will not have to go back to the vet today. Lying snotty and sobbing on the kitchen floor, I know I have become a cat person.

Back in 2006, right after Tim and I got married, we realized that Peanut had put on quite a bit of weight. In the nine-month period before our wedding, Tim and Peanut had been living with roommates, one of whom was another cat. Peanut tried to befriend this cat, but she demurred. So, he availed himself of her ready supply of food. He was in danger of cat-adult-onset diabetes, so we put him on a diet.

For six years, we measured out his food, he lost a couple pounds, and begged to be fed all the time. He liked to nibble on my bare legs and scratch at my dissertation desk while I tried, often in vain, to wrestle the Diaries of Virginia Woolf to the ground.

Yeah, I screamed at him a few times. A few times a day.

I remember quipping to my friends at a party, “I’m pretty much over Peanut.” I should have said, “I’m pretty much over Virginia Woolf,” because it wasn’t Peanut who was killing me, it was her. But he was easier to blame. As I cared for him throughout summer 2013, I apologized a lot.

Over time we decided to stop the chemo treatments. All they did was make him nauseous. He started eating more, and we rejoiced.

As I patched my research holes on intimacy in Middlemarch, the ever-shrinking Peanut curled up in my lap to keep warm, even in the summer heat. As summer turned to autumn, he ate less and less.

The week before Thanksgiving, we had to let him go. Carrying Peanut, I approached the vet hospital receptionist and said, “I have come to euthanize my cat.”

January 2014

There’s been no cat here for me to care for or talk to. One day, I caught myself petting my own pony-tail. A few days later, I decided to name it Harrison. I miss the Harrison phase. Anything I did, I announced to Tim that Harrison and I were doing it. While we enjoyed this source of hilarity, we also knew it was time to find our new cats. At the Gifford House Cat Shelter, Iris and Lateegra were quartered in the basement–Iris lived in the shower stall and Lateegra lived about ten feet away, in one of those cages we all call “crates.”

I am a cat person and a primary cat parent. I clean the litter box. (Well, we take turns.) Here is what I know about quality of life:

Sitting in the sun means the cat is happy. Sitting in the window means the cat is happy. And if you’re working at your dissertation desk, or your adjunct-academic desk, or your freelance-math-book-editor desk, hacking through the current learning curve, and you look down and find a cat sitting on the rug next to you, all four feet curled underneath, kind of resembling a loaf of bread, it means this:

“I kind of like you.”

Which makes me happy.

— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

Peanut in our Somerville apartment, on my dissertation desk.

The Last Blind Date

Another date at a coffee shop. Tim on the left, Rebecca on the right.

CAMBRIDGE

April, 2005

1369 Coffee

The cafe was full, but I’d arrived early and gotten a small table, just across from the entrance. The door was open to let in the spring air.

I’d been frequenting 1369 Coffee since I first moved to Boston from Ohio, eight months prior. In 2005, the punk-rock aesthetic that most of the baristas sported seemed like the epitome of cool to me. And is that Radiohead’s The Bends I hear playing in the background? And are all these stern looking people reading and writing at their little tables probably intellectuals, poet/writers, or revolutionaries? Yes. After eight months living in Boston, 1369 Coffee in Cambridge was probably the coolest place I’d ever been. It made me cooler, just by walking through the door. Why hadn’t I arranged to meet my other blind dates here?

In his Friendster pictures, he was either peaking out from behind a fluffy cat or posed in quiet contemplation. In one picture, he was gazing out a large window, leaning forward, palms together, hands pressed against his lips. He looked like he was praying, which I found odd, but the cat pictures intrigued me.

He walked in and I set down the copy of The Journals of Lewis and Clark I’d been studying. From my seat, he seemed impossibly tall. The late-afternoon sun blazed behind him through the cafe’s vast storefront window, lighting him up, golden.

We said hi. He smiled. I smiled. He’s way out of my league.

I’d seen pictures of Tim on Friendster, but that was only after I found him on Craigslist. This was a few years before the Craigslist killer, and before the “dating” sections became indistinguishable from the “casual encounters” section. I went with Craigslist, first of all, because the only other method of online dating that I knew was match.com, and the only people I knew who used it were my mom’s friends and my forty-something ex-boyfriend.

All of those people were divorced professionals. In 2005, I was 26 years old with a dial-up connection, and if I hadn’t just moved so far away from everyone I knew, I’d just keep relying on the age-old matchmaking network of friends’ friends congregating at parties and bars. But I didn’t know anyone in Boston. I’d spent the entirety of the fall semester either in class or in my bedroom. By January, I thought, that’s enough of that.

I first heard of Craigslist in May, 2004, when I first visited the Northeastern campus. I’d never had to find roommates from a distance before and was growing increasingly worried that I would wind up in a hugely over-priced utility closet in someone’s basement. The PhD student* who was showing us around told me I could find roommates on Craigslist.

“Regs List?”

“No, Cuh-raig’s List.”

I found the site. Its mass of tiny blue links dazzled me. You can find roommates here! And jobs, and bicycles, and clubs to join! And also, maybe, boyfriends.

These days, getting your pictures online is child’s play, but when I was reaching out through my dial-up connection I had to use my roommate’s scanner to upload my school ID picture. And I didn’t know how to change iPhoto’s HUGE auto-setting for attachments. After one or two gigantic picture exchanges that went nowhere, I established a rule of no pictures in either direction — a rule that would immediately sink any on-line dating endeavor today. I would respond only to well-written and intriguing Craigslist personals.

Between January and April 2005, while also keeping up with my grad school coursework, I went on about four blind dates a week, sometimes two dates in one day. Most of those were one and done, but I did manage to court a few guys for a while.

There was the research librarian who was very nice and smart, who was taken with the way I wrote Library of Congress call numbers on the back of my hand, but who reminded me too much of my uncle. There was the pony-tailed radical who seemed to know everyone, everywhere we went, and who lost interest in me because I asked too many questions. And finally, there was the Spanish graduate student — this was the most romantic courtship by far. On our second date, as I was telling a story about something, he abruptly leaned across the restaurant table and kissed me on the mouth. “I could wait no more,” he said.  I liked him most of all…but alas, when I admitted that I was still dating around, he broke it off. Damned honesty.

But it doesn’t matter. I thought I liked the Spanish guy, but that was before I met Tim at 1369. I told him on our third date — after we’d decided to go steady — that until I met him, I thought I was doomed to never really like anybody ever again. Everyone I’d dated between January and April was cute, nice, smart, interesting — the test of writing style had worked! And yet…meh.

After things ended with the radical and the Spanish guy, I took matters into my own hands. I posted my first and last ever personal ad on Craigslist.

“I was just on my way to the sink to wash my hands of dating,” the ad read, “but maybe someone can change my mind.”

Turns out, someone could.

“Is that Lewis and Clark?!”

Was he genuinely interested in this book? It seemed so. We talked for a while about Lewis’s brooding intensity and Clark’s abysmal spelling. Apparently there had just been a story about the Lewis and Clark Journals in Smithsonian, so the extreme differences in their writing were fresh in his mind. I was impressed. I tried to impress him back with a story about how Clark doted on Sacagawea’s son. Clark nicknamed him “Pomp,” or sometimes, “Little Pompy.”**

This prompted some giggling on both sides, and then an awkward silence. We decided to go for a walk, down Mass Ave. to the Middle East Rock Club, then across the street and back up towards the cafe. We stopped at Rodney’s bookstore. We meandered through the stacks. When I found the “Cat” section, I stopped and started pulling out books. I wasn’t really into cats, but, for reasons then mysterious to me, I loved that he was.

Suddenly, he thrust a book toward me. On the page, a line-drawing of two cats mating.

“REEOW!!!”

He meowed and broke the quiet of the sleepy bookstore. He meowed, and I dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.

In his pictures, at the cafe, and all along Mass. Ave., he radiated an intriguing combination of calm reserve and something else. Something very silly and mischievous kept peaking out from behind his shy smile. And here it was. “REEOW!!!” indeed.

— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze

Met at 1369 Coffee. Walked down Mass Ave., then back up, then into Rodneys where the deal was basically sealed.

*The PhD student who introduced me to Craigslist became a life-long friend. She even played the piano at the wedding.

** Little Pomy’s real name: Jean Baptiste Charbonneau

My Meow Mile

SOMERVILLE, MA

The Meow Mile: October 12, 2014, 10:30 am
Between Davis Square and Union Square

Some fifty of us clustered around the starting line, where the Minuteman Bike Path intersects Willow Ave. If you drove by that day, you probably noticed the crowd; then you probably noticed the abundance of runners wearing fluffy cat ears. I didn’t have a pair; it never even occurred to me to get one. But, of course, once I saw them I was tremendously jealous of the ear people. In cat ears or not, we were all gathered to “run, walk, and pounce” a 5K in support of the Charles River Alley Cats and the Gifford Cat Shelter. The organizers were all in high spirits at the turnout, despite falling short of their fundraising goal. Fortunately, there’s an app for that. You can raise money with every step you take, so with luck, smartphones, and a lot of stepping, the goal will be within reach. (You can search and select any shelter you want to support, including both Gifford Shelter and Charles River Alleycats — it’s really easy.)

The cat ears are all the more necessary because there is an Official High-Five/Fist-Bump for the Meow Mile. It is performed as follows:

Face each other. High-Five (as normal.)

Immediately, Fist-Bump and then Lick Your Fist (or pretend to.)

Finish by Rubbing Licked Fist against Forehead in One Circular Motion.

You see now how the cat ears really make the whole thing. But we can imagine we have cat ears, can’t we? Yes we can. from pixabay.com

My partner Tim and I like to do local 5K walk/runs because they serve as a sort of “exercise event” in our lives — something we can go out and do together on a weekend morning that lets us interact with the town. We like things like this because they make us feel like we live here, and are not in fact a nation of 2. But we were really looking forward to the Meow Mile because the Gifford Cat Shelter introduced us to Iris and Lateegra. One and Two Years Old, respectively, both Iris and Lateegra were found at feeding stations that both the Gifford Shelter and the Charles River Alleycats maintain. Both organizations watch over feeding stations and — quite heroically, I think — round up stray and feral cats, determine which have been socialized (and are thus “adoptable”), which are feral, neuter/spay all of them, and then either relocate the adoptable cats to a no-kill shelter or return the feral cats to their colonies. You can find out more about how feral cat colonies work and the positive effects of catch-neuter/spay-return at the Charles River Alleycat website. Feral cats are pretty fascinating.

Before setting out, Tim had studied the map. He showed me, told me the turns. I half listened, assuming there would be signs or volunteers along the route to tell me which way to go. I glanced at the map, got the general shape. Then the race began.

I’m working up to running races, and so for this one I embraced the option to “walk/run.” Tim ran — he’s pretty seasoned, and he was the first one out. He never wins, but he likes to best himself. It was a gorgeous day; one of those cloudless blue days, just crisp enough to make you glad it’s October. I sniffed the autumn air and let the faster people pass me by. Along the way, I saw some places I’d forgotten that I loved since moving from Somerville to Medford: Hub Comics at Bow St. and Walnut, where I bought my first Moomin; and Highland Kitchen, where we celebrated my dissertation defense.

I knew that Tim would be finished in half the time it took me; when I was in the home stretch, I broke into a run. The walkers were clustering together and moving too slow for me (If I’m walking, I want to walk really fast.) I darted across the finish line and Fist Bump-Face Washed with Tim. He complemented me on my time; indeed, his was half as long. “You’re not gonna believe this,” he said, with a sheepish look on his face. “Oh my god, you won, didn’t you?” He nodded. As usually happens, faster runners pulled ahead of him. But apparently none of them had paid attention to the map.

Iris and the magic oven mitt.

Lateegra, inhabiting the writing room window.

Meow Mile Map

 

–Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze