Cat's eye

Last night I set my alarm for midnight. When it went off, I set it for 1am and spent 15 minutes administering 3 different drops to our oldest cat Frida's left eye, with 5 minutes between each drop. At 1am, I set the alarm for 2am and spent 15 minutes dosing Frida's eye, and so the night went in increments of 35-40 minutes sleeping and 15 minutes dosing. Soon I hope to take a nap. The results of this aggressive medication were more encouraging than expected this morning when the doctor rechecked Frida's eye.

Frida called us up from across the street in 1995. She was about 6 months old, we were told by the young veterinarian who had just opened her practice in a town center near our house. Our neighbor and fishing friend had a fish cleaning station outside his house, a stainless steel sink salvaged from a local deli. Frida found it and stuck to it like glue. Bob heard her calling. He told me he heard something and went to investigate. I followed him by a couple of minutes and saw this tiny pale cat looking up at my husband, and he was looking down at her. We took her back to our house and fed her and started calling pet rescue organizations. They sent us to the young vet who was running a special on the surgery and vaccination package that the pet rescue required. The next morning, my husband, who has severe allergies to dogs and a little less reaction to cats, said, "Let's keep her." We had found homes for lost cats and kittens before. But they hadn't called him up personally, like Frida did, and they didn't have a creamy belly with tan spots on the underside and pale pastel tortoiseshell hair everywhere else. They didn't a pointy tale so flea bitten that the hair never grew back straight over patches of the tip. They weren't artistic in the litter box, like Frida, raking the clay into garden formations.

In 2006, Frida's recurring corneal ulcers led to a series of procedures that didn't work and instead resulted in a nasty sequestrum, a black scab that a veterinary professor deftly sliced off, leaving Frida's cornea thinner and more likely to be dry and irritated by allergens. But she was declared cured and a follow up corneal graft was not deemed necessary. Now she has an ulcer for the first time since that surgery, along with a destructive infection that is making it hard for her eye to heal the ulcer, even though it has formed blood vessels reaching toward the ulcer just as it did before. After yesterday's afternoon and night of vigilant medicating, the infection is losing ground and the ulcer is already smaller. I was fully prepared to face the removal of the eye, after putting Frida through months of medication all those years ago. I knew that if the ulcer was not halted quickly, it would break through her already thin cornea and she would lose the eye painfully and dangerously. I also know that we have limited resources for expensive procedures and hospitalization, which is why I dosed her myself through the night.

It's not over yet, but the eye has gained some ground against the baddies, and that's nice because appliances and vehicles have been breaking at a dizzying pace around our house this summer. It takes more than a call to the plumber to fix a broken cat, but it is the most important repair we have to undertake right now.