As many of you know, my mom has been struggling with serious
health issues this past year.
As many of you know, my mom has been struggling with serious health issues this past year. My life is an endless spiral of visits to doctors and specialists. You know you’ve been spending too much time at the pharmacy when everyone there knows you by name. As if my schedule weren’t already filled with enough medically related activity, this past week one of my cats needed to visit the vet. She hasn’t been eating much lately, wants more attention, and seems to be losing weight.
My tortoise-shell beauty named Finn knows what I am doing before I ever bring out her carrier. I wait until she is relaxed, then tip it on end and hold my breath, waiting until the moment is just right, then quickly try to ease her into the box. Of course, she resists with her elbows locked, arms braced against the sides of the carrier in a desperate attempt to keep her body from making the plunge.
I find myself grabbing a handful of Finn’s long cinnamon- and chocolate-colored fur at the nape of her neck. I am slashed by razor sharp claws as she frantically swings from side to side. I finally win this round as she goes reeling into the bottom of the carrier.
I only succeed in making it to the vet with her about once every three years. It takes her that long to get over the last visit and forget the purpose of the purple box with the swinging silver door long enough for me to have any chance of getting her into it.
I am worried because although Finn seems hungry and meows anxiously whenever I open the fridge, the food in her dish remains untouched. She wakes me up at night banging the cabinet doors as she hunts for food, even though her dish is full of food. She is not a finicky cat. All the way to the vet, she howls like a prisoner scheduled for execution. This wasn’t exactly the kind of attention she was looking for.
“Finn is about 7, and sometimes around this age we see a phenomenon in which the cat seems ravenously hungry, yet she will continue to lose weight,” the vet tells me. “The cat has an appetite and wants to eat all the time, yet can’t keep any weight on. It’s a condition known as hyperthyroidism. We can run some tests to find out for sure.”
“It happens around this age?” I repeat.
“I’m saying there might be an underlying physical cause, but then again, it might just be that she is really bored with her food or with something in her environment. It could be a – ”
“Mid-life crisis?!” I finish the sentence.
“Well, she is middle-aged in cat terms,” the vet said.
The next day the blood test panel and the urinalysis results are ready. “Finn’s blood work is wholly unremarkable,” the vet’s message says on my answering machine. “So that’s a great thing. We can try a different diet and see if she eats better.”
After the vet visit, Finn neither drinks nor eats and stays in complete hiding for more than 15 hours. When she finally shows herself, it’s to bat the chicken drumstick out of my hand at dinner and take a bite out of it. Meanwhile, her dish sits filled to the brim with one of the best feline foods on the market, available only from the veterinarian and costing more per pound than See’s candy. It remains untouched.
I think I feel my own mid-life crisis coming on.
