🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured.
The cat behaviorist and I are on Zoom. He has scraggly blonde hair. Both of his ear lobes have stretched piercings, leaving two enormous holes. I explain my kitten Zosi’s most recent nighttime attack.
Zosi is the kitten I’ve adopted from a breeder who lied about her age—she was much younger than eight weeks, the appropriate time for a kitten to be taken from her mother, though some feel it should be more like twelve weeks—and didn’t socialize her properly.
“It sounds like mild play aggression,” he says.
Mild? Play aggression?
He clears his throat. “You’d be surprised. I’ve seen severe aggression in cats, but this sounds fairly common.”
Common? I tell him she’s attacking me when I sleep.
“You’re her only playmate. She thinks you’re the one to entice to play.”
Entice to play?
With Zosi, I’m sinking—or I think I am, falling back into serious mental illness if that’s even possible. It seemed I’d healed, but she’s brought back all the familiar darkness and agitation and even suicidality.
A kitten. I’m blaming a kitten.
He says, “You probably want to get another cat.”
I do not want to get another cat. I have a cat—Zosi—and it isn’t going well.
“You could foster. Just keep the kitten in the bathroom and when…”
He goes on, but I don’t hear him. Zosi is scratching at the bathroom door. Within minutes, there’s a banging sound. She’s throwing herself against the door to get out.
“There’s hope,” he says.
The pit in my stomach vanishes. Hope—the one thing I wasn’t given during the twenty-five years in the mental health system. Clinicians told me my diagnoses were forever.
“Once she’s spayed, her behavior and personality will change. She’ll calm down a lot.”
Soon. Soon, it will all be fine.
*
The night Zosi spends at the vet for observation after her spay surgery I lie in bed, my eyes heavy with sleep. It’s blissful and filled with guilt. No gate is up because no kitten will hurdle it and jump on the bed and wait for the right moment to pounce on my arms or if my arms are tucked under the covers, my face. I try not to think about the Reddit thread in which more than one avatar described how their kittens became more aggressive after being spayed or neutered.
The sodden pit in my stomach twists.
It’s unfair and wrong to wish she won’t come back, but I do. I want it the next morning when my father drives me to pick her up. He wears his yellow baseball hat and a windbreaker. His voice is jovial, but his eyes droop. It crushes me to know that he’s eighty, and I missed all those years of knowing him when I was sick.
I ask if he’s tired. He shakes his head.
We drive. Finally, I say, “I don’t know what to do.”
“About?” my father asks.
“Zosi.” At a stoplight, I push up my sleeves and show him my forearms. The backs of my hands are bitten and scratched too.
He raises his eyebrows. “Well, you can’t keep living like that.”
A rush of relief fills me. It’s not me. I’m not getting sick. I’m having a normal reaction to an abnormal situation, and I can’t keep living like this.
Inside the vet, the tech brings Zosi into the examination room in the carrier. Zosi is floppy as the tech pulls her out. Her eyes are glazed over. She can’t stand up.
In a sweet, high-pitched voice—an animal lover’s voice—the tech says that Zosi’s still affected by the anesthesia. “She’s doing really well, though.”
Around Zosi’s neck is an inflatable collar to prevent her from biting the stitches. I bought it instead of using the cone the vet gives because the internet said an inflatable collar was more comfortable.
The vet comes in and explains how to inject the pain reliever into Zosi’s gums and what to watch for in terms of the stitches and the wound. The vet points at the inflatable collar. “Is that yours?”
I nod.
The vet slips Zosi into the carrier and zips it shut. “All right. If that’s what you want to use.”
When we return to the car, my father is asleep in the driver’s seat, his head hunched over. I open the passenger-side door and sit with the carrier on my lap. He opens his eyes. “Dad, are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he says, “I’m fine.”
At home, once Zosi stumbles out of the carrier, she comes to her senses enough to writhe on the carpet and kick and paw at the inflatable collar. Like a feline Houdini, she’s out of it in less than sixty seconds.
I call my father, who hasn’t even made it home yet. We return to the vet. Zosi is placed in the usual cone, which makes her look like a Nordic Episcopalian priest.
At home, Zosi wobbles and plays with the water in her bowl like a college kid tripping on LSD.
I sit on the couch. She comes over. I pick her up and rest her on my chest, where she sleeps on and off for the next few hours. She’s a different cat—all cuddles and sweetness. Not once does she bite. The spaying worked.
It isn’t until I inject the first dose of painkiller that I realize the spaying didn’t work; she was just high. There’s a crushing weight on my chest.
I’m trying to develop what the neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who runs the Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University, calls “high emotional granularity.” High emotional granularity is the (enviable) ability to identify and name your emotions; low granularity means trying to name your emotions is like throwing darts at a wall without knowing what to aim at. People with high emotional granularity have more resilience. They can distinguish between disappointment and despondency. But at that moment, looking at Zosi, I still can’t.
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