Someone's best one-night stand - #87

Blood bags, tumors, and screaming in public.

My Zoloft prescription ran out the day I had a tumor sliced out of my neck. The surgery was on a dreary January Monday in Washington, D.C. Weren’t all Mondays dreary in D.C.? It would take at least six hours, they said, maybe more. But of course it doesn’t matter. Anesthesia is time travel. I woke up without a tumor, and in its place: nerve damage and chest pain. I was meant to be released the next day, but they kept me until Wednesday for observation. What was a 24-year-old doing with this strange tumor anyway? I left the hospital with a drainage bag attached to my neck, pinned to the collar of my shirt. I couldn’t move the right side of my face. I emailed my boss.

“The surgery was a little more intense than I anticipated. I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it in this week.”

“Please be here on Friday.”

I worked for the National Institutes of Health at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where I would later contract dysentery and be peeled off the ground of an underground metro platform, unconscious. My boss smiled like a lid on a boiling pot, her lips near curdling. 

I went to work that Friday. I couldn’t brush my hair because the pressure on my neck was too painful. The blood bag clipped to my collar seeped on my shirt. I was sleeping as well as anyone does after their ear is partially sliced off to remove a tumor burrowing beneath it. I was thinking as clearly as anyone does when they stop taking an antidepressant the same day as their first major surgery. 

That Friday, because I didn’t understand how boundaries or rights worked, I walked across the NIH campus toward my building looking more like a patient than an employee. My boss stared at me when I walked into the small office and then didn’t speak to me again. I wrote for four hours, which was not my job, before I went into her office. 

“I need to go home.” Blood streaked down the right side of my shirt. 

“Have a nice weekend!” She beamed, actively looking everywhere that was not my blood bag.

I smiled, or tried. The right side of my face was temporarily paralyzed from the surgery, so the left side of my mouth hoisted itself like a marionette, a courtesy smile from hell.

“Gonna work on my face,” I said pointing to my partially slack expression.

“Sorry?” 

“Nerve damage,” I said out of the working corner of my mouth. “Gonna try to exercise it. Do some heavy lifting while I watch TV.” My face contorted from the kind of stifled laughter usually reserved for broken ribs and strict teachers.

“Ok!” She almost yelled, her own face contorting with discomfort.

Three months prior to the surgery, the doctors had said, “we’re really not sure if it’s cancer or not.” Followed immediately by, “we can schedule you for surgery in three months.” It was a long three months. It had been a long 12 months prior to that of trying to convince doctors there was something wrong with me. The tumor was gone, but the anxiety was just beginning. Death was something that could happen. And it did, nearly immediately.

I was sharing an apartment with a woman named Mallory, really the only woman who I could ever (in good conscience) call vivacious and mean it. Mallory was letting me recover from surgery in her bedroom while she slept in my room: on a mattress on the floor next to my cardboard box bedside table. She had a giant Maine Coon cat who would come to check on me every few hours. It was the highlight of what were incredibly low days. 

Mallory brought it up first. 

“You should get a cat.” She was wearing aqua leopard leggings. Her streaked brown curls twice the width of her hair. 

“I should get a cat.”

And so me and my blood bag went to the Washington D.C. Humane Society. I took three different metro lines followed by a 20-minute walk to get there. It was worth it to find the most beautiful cat I’d ever seen. Philippe was a 2-year-old long-haired gray and white cat with mesmerizing green eyes. He collapsed into my arms immediately, purring as he pushed his muzzle into my chest. This. This is what I needed.

But Philippe wasn’t neutered. I would need to come back in two days after his operation before I could take him home. 

My blood bag and I made the journey all over again two days later, and Philippe looked about as good as I did. His fur was matted, his third eyelids showing. 

“I don’t think he’s OK?”

“Oh he’s fine, just recovering from the surgery. He’ll just need to take it easy tonight.”

“Are you sure?”

They were sure. 

They were wrong.

As soon as I got Philippe home, to my own bedroom where the real recovery would begin, he started to seize. He peed himself on my bed. And I called my mom. She told me to keep him warm, play a metronome sound from my phone to mimic the noise of his mother’s heartbeat, and to just stay with him. I fell asleep on the floor with Philippe’s head resting in my hand. 

In the morning, he was dead. 

Now, I know this sounds sad, and it was. But, this is what happened next.

First, I lost my mind. This was maybe six days after having my neck cut open. I was cold turkey from Zoloft, high on Percocet, and did I mention that the guy I was dating had ghosted me the month before because he didn’t want to date someone who might have cancer? Waking up with a dead cat in my arms sent me into a fit of wailing and in my scramble to get up, the blood bag ripped off, spilling all over me. I ran sobbing, covered in blood, into Mallory’s room screaming, “PHILIPPE IS DEAD! HE’S DEAD!” 

Mallory shot up from her bed. So did the random guy she’d brought home the night before who was seeing, for the first time in his life, a sleep-deprived, blood-covered woman who hadn’t brushed (or washed!) her hair in over a week yelling about how someone named Philippe was now, presumably, dead. 

Mallory went into action.

“It’s OK. We’re going to handle this.” She turned to the guy. “We need your car.”

“You what?” He recoiled, bare chested. 

“You’re driving.” God I loved her. She turned back to me. “Wrap the body in a towel, we’re going to take care of this.” 

“What the fuck is happening?” He leapt out bed, pant-less.

“HE’S DEAD!” 

It’s worth mentioning that Mallory, in the year that I lived with her, had three missed connections about her. Men bent to her will like thumb push puppets. I went to my room to wrap Philippe in a towel, and when I emerged Mallory’s one-night-stand stood fully dressed, arms crossed nervously and head bowed. 

“He’s taking us. We’re going to the Humane Society and getting you a new cat.” 

So off we went. My ferocious roommate, her latest toy, my dead cat, and me — soaked in cat urine and blood. 

The staff at the humane society clearly recognized this as a problem. They were very quick to take any evidence and immediately offer me any cat in the building. It is important to remember though that I was on drugs. 

“But I can’t take just any cat! If they were here when I picked Philippe then I’ll always know they were second best,” I sobbed. “I only want to see cats that weren’t here two days ago!” I sobbed and yelled. 

“Well,” the man offered, “we only have this one kitten, but there’s a guy who has papers on him. He’s deciding between him and a bunny.” 

I turned in all my horrifying glory to this poor man and through bared teeth unleashed literal years of rage.

“If he can’t decide between a kitten and a bunny, then he doesn’t! DESERVE! EITHER!!!!” 

So I left with the kitten. That humane society location was in the news for misconduct and disarray a month later, and not even because of me. I read the news with a tabby named Alistaire in my lap.

Al was my first adult pet. He moved with me from D.C. to New York to Boulder. He saw me through some of the worst years of my life. He walked on a leash through the airport like he’d paid the paparazzi to see him. He was also the first pet I’d adopted. The cats that came into my life as a kid were all barn cats. They were born in our barn and adopted out to neighbors, excluding the very few my parents were willing to invite into our home. Seeing his little face, terrified, staring into my face, terrified — it planted a seed that I finally got to act on, over ten years later. I wanted to save more animals.

When Snoots passed, our local humane society (a one-woman, no-building show) went above and beyond to help us through the process. I told her then that come May, when we’d had time to leave and to grieve, we wanted to foster. Because our local humane society doesn’t have a physical location, the woman behind it works to rescue animals primarily by placing them into foster care before they’re adopted locally. In 2023 alone, she has facilitated over 50 adoptions in this area. Including our latest. 

Many of you last week were quick to accuse me of Foster Failure, and I’d like to let you know this was actually a Foster Frame Job. Our humane society angel knew we were looking for a tiny maniac. She had us foster only this cat because she thought he might be the one. And he is. He’s fucking nuts. I texted her last Sunday evening to say we wanted to adopt him. Her reply was simply, “YAY!!!” 

But that left my debt unpaid. So when she texted again on Thursday in a bind, I said “we can help.” That night a beautiful siamese cat moved into our second bedroom. She’d been found abandoned with her kittens. Since her rescue, two adoptions in a row fell through due to no fault of her own. All her babies have since been adopted out, and now what she really needs is a safe place to rest, to land, until someone takes her in forever. That place is here. 

For all my hardest moments, animals have offered me the most lasting salvation. They have offered me the softest of landings again and again. On Friday I felt the overwhelm of too many things to do, too many chores left unfinished, too many projects delayed until Ben can heal, and as I leaned back on the couch to take a deep intentional breath, I felt claws on my stomach. A tiny kitten was burrowing up my sweatshirt, climbing his way up my torso before shoving his head through the neck hole and promptly falling asleep with the soft sigh of a new life.

In another room, a cat was sleeping on her first bed with her first toy. Both of these cats were found cold and hungry in a dumping ground. With the help of our community, we’re saving both of them, and hopefully more to come. The best part is, I didn’t even have to sleep with a stranger and drive their roommate to the humane society while she soaked my car with blood and urine to do it.

Fostering an animal takes time and space, but if you have both, you can save an animal’s life. Contact your local animal rescue to see how you can help animals in need.