Tinsel
Tinsel
My tiny girl, Tinsel, left the mortal world, last evening. It was shortly after her regular vet visit, the one in which the senior vet had assured me that her temperature was gaining heat and that she looked better than she had last morning. I didn’t see a lot of reason to believe him but I do trust his opinion and I believed also what I saw on the thermometer. I brought her home in a state that can only be described as somewhere between drowsy and comatose.
Tinsel came to me in a large blue wiry cage, along with her cage-mates (even typing that word makes me cringe), Teenie, Beanie and Carol, who soon turned out to be Carl. They were delivered to my house by the animal shelter rescue van, on Christmas.
I remember that I had been missing the whole fostering bit of late and every day (this is still true), I look at my handmade door sign that I’ve hung, which reads my resolutions for 2018 to me: Fitness, Fosters, Felines, Finances. And I know that this is part of the deal. And I know that it gets easier the more we do it. And I know that in cases where the kittens are too vulnerable to infections, have been abandoned, have had major accidents and/or have prominent malnutrition and related diseases, fostering can give them comfort but little else.
I must mention, though, that I am blessed to have constant support of my foster group from the Noida SPCA Animal Shelter and Hospital and some incredible and generous animal-loving veterinarian guidance from the JRG Vet Clinic at the Damodar Complex, about 100 meters from my house. Knowing that I am surrounded by hopeful hearts and hard work gives me strength to do this more and with more conviction.
Also, I owe every moment of feline comfort to my family, including my wonderful new sister, who have accepted my love for the furballs with little ado. Whenever I have fosters, I can focus entirely on their care and forget about my own cats. They even check up on my fosters when I’m not around, especially my mother (who was such a stentorian cleanliness lover that we weren’t allowed to touch animals and then come into the house without washing our hands with soap), who accepts all (and I mean ALL) cats and kittens as her own, and lovingly cleans them, feeds them, gives them medication when they need it, gives them dry and clean clothes to sleep on and frees up all the space and time she can to make them feel loved. My heart overflows with the kind of acceptance and absolute welcome I see for animals in my home.
But today, I am in pain. I miss my Tinsey. She really dug into the innards of my heart, as strange as that image sounds. Also, I don’t really care if this post is ordinary, because when the feelings are this authentic, I can hardly be bothered to make the words stand out.
On day one, Tinsey baby was definitely in a lot of pain and more than than, perhaps, agitation. She was lying in one corner of the cage. The other three corners were occupied by Beanie with the wound and the gentlest manner possible, Teenie — who was snarly and as big as my palm but fully alert (I cannot imagine it was from any good past experience) and who had a wounded leg that was already sloughing off with dead skin and a broken tail that still remains almost adorably tilted at an angle (but is fully healed and functional, I assure you) and of course, our Carol/Carl wonder, who was the biggest, pot-bellied punter, emaciated, wounded under the chin and near the mouth and scared, but immediately trusting and ravenous. Carl taught Teenie to come out and eat, use the litter (thank you, my dude) and basically be a kitten. To my eternal wonder, even Beanie, for the time that he lived, tried to go to the litter tray because cats are the most wondrous of beings and I am forever in their awe.
Tinsel, however, was lying on her side and growling if any of these went close to her. They weren’t growling back but the air was tense and very heavy with hiss and spittle, I imagine.
When I see an angry kitten, my first instinct is to scoop him up and shower him with love and warmth and food and well, a warm shower and a coconut oil massage. (Coconut oil is good for them in small quantities, and it kills bacteria in their tummies — if they lick themselves — and also dries up the egg sacks left near the ears and under paws by pesty ticks and fleas. In my experience, this works magically and eases the kitten. Once I can get them to take a nap near me or on me, on a full belly, the hard part is then over and we are on the right track. This time, since I didn’t have experience with paralysed kittens, I did my shower and feeding ritual with Teenie, Beanie and Carl, who liked it in varying degrees, respectively.
I took Tinsel to the vet first and we did an X-ray and saw that her hind half was damaged severely. Her rib cage was fractured and her spine was jutting out of her back like a hump, but smaller. She didn’t have any sensations in her hind legs but was active and alert. She ate well and drank a lot and after two days of gentamycin, anima strath, gripe water, liquid paraffin and her other meds, she was eating regularly, combating dehydration successfully and showing signs of strength and recovery to whatever extent that was possible. I also learned how to help her empty her bowels by making her ‘express the bowel’ and it was an instant success. We were pooping twice a day and peeing thrice a day after drinking warm KMR and having wet tuna in jelly. The docs were giving her fewer and fewer medicines and telling me to start her physiotherapy soon.
Tinsel used to love riding on my shoulder (the left one), and look over my shoulder at the world passing by, while grabbing onto my sweater. She would call out to me every time I entered my room, and told me when she wanted to pee or poop. She loved her tent mates (she lived with Teenie and Carl in a cozy little soft tent made out of an old Tee, some hanger wires and a deep cardboard box lined with mattresses and blankets. They loved smushing together in front of the heater (which was on 24×7 for them) and falling asleep on full bellies all hours of the day.
She would crawl out half way for water but all the way for food, because she was my Tinsey and took after me I think.
Her favourite time of the day was when we went to the doc, because she got to ride on my shoulder, talk to me and get some air. At night, she used to fall asleep under a warm glow of my cove lights and with the TV tuned to Animal Planet who usually play big cat specials at night. I was going to make her her very own special walker, which would have enabled her to pull herself and be mobile.
I had decided to keep her because I knew no one would take a special needs cat. We are not there yet in India, I believe. I hope I am very wrong.
I am not going to talk about what happened to her when she got sick because it is painful and I still don’t quite understand. All I know is that I am absolutely shattered and I miss my little baby girl. She used to hold my hand like she knew who I was. She used to lick my ear and give me butterfly kisses every time she rode me to the vet. Her eyes were very talkative and her eagerness to reach to me was nothing less than humbling.
While I can turn this around to gratitude and how she knew she was loved and she went quickly with no suffering and all that jazz, the truth that’s choking me right now, as it has been since she passed, is that my dear girl is no longer here and I’m sick about it. Today, in class, I had to write a paragraph about a woman with a broken heart, to show my students in creative writing how to do it and I don’t know from where it came, but it came out like this:
“The 10 ams and the 7.15 pms had become so routine for us that we almost looked forward to them — the time spent together, one clinging to the other’s shoulder, half for support, half for succour; the time for a short walk and a long wait; the time for diagnosis and who knew what else each day. But it was our time.
Yesterday, there was something in her eyes which didn’t feel quite right. They were half closed, half-moon-y. I saw her and all sorts of clichés avalanched on my senses, the biggest of them all that I was going to lose her soon. Despite my best efforts to strengthen my insides, my gut had given up and gone home. My head was still in the right place as I took her for our 10 am, hungry (me) and groggy (her) in our embrace against the wind.
She died in what I cannot explain in units of time. It was between seconds, and between heartbeats. Her body went limp, then jerked around in my hands, all two parts of her, paralysis and all, and her eyes kept losing focus from my face, which was my last window to what was happening. I didn’t hear her though, no meowing, no hissing, not even a mew.
She kind of gave up all of a sudden. I talked to her all through the journey to bury her, trying to rekindle something — a heartbeat or a heart.”
I love you, Tinsel girl. And I miss you dearly.
