gemini://gem.lizsugar.me/2023/06/24/when-grief-and-trauma-become-background-noise.gmi

Duster had a stroke a few weeks ago and for the first couple of days it was the worst thing I had ever experienced. I was a complete wreck, absolutely beside myself the entire time. My baby boy was suffering and though we took him to the ER and they released him back to us after 20 hours with care instructions and medication, it felt like there was nothing I could do to help him.

We've been together since January 6th, 2009. He was 9 months old when I brought him home and I would turn 21 years old that same month. To save you the math, I turned 35 this year and he is 15 years old. It's not an exaggeration to say that he's been part of my entire adult life. I adore this cat more than anyone or anything in the world. He is my first ever pet (we had fish as kids, but honestly my mom took care of them and I never attached to any of them anyway) and he will always have such a large place in my heart. We've been through so much together. There's one thought that's recurred ever since I found him during his stroke: I don't know what I'm going to do without him.

I'm almost hesitant to recount my experience of finding him, but I also feel like if I don't put it down somewhere it will haunt me. Olive had just been to the vet a couple weeks earlier for a long term upper respiratory infection, which meant he was getting twice daily liquid antibiotics by mouth. On this night he had a particularly rough time taking it and drooled everywhere. As I was cleaning up after Olive, I found Duster on the floor in my room, it looked like he was grooming himself but.. he wasn't moving, just staring ahead. And there was a large wet spot on his side that I couldn't determine the smell of (later would realize it was a pool of his drool). So since I already had all the stuff for Olive I wiped him down .. and Duster just sort of.. fell over. And didn't move.

I walked out of the room, not processing what I saw. That's not his normal behavior, he should have righted himself and protested about what I had done. I walked back in. He was still laying on the ground in that unnatural position. I found my wife, terror in my eyes, and told her to come quick. We had just had a nice long day out in Chicago, and the previous weekend we had visited my family near Detroit, so we were completely wiped. All we wanted at that point was a nice sleep. But my cat was not moving.

I've never had to deal with someone else's medical emergency before. I've had a few of my own, but otherwise whenever anything happened to someone it was while I was young and our parents always handled everything. But uh, I'm glad it was a cat this time and not like, my wife. I feel like I was pretty useless and had to be told what to do. We observed him for a bit, and noticed that he couldn't put weight on his left legs and was generally very unresponsive. At one point as I sat over him, he moved to me and leaned his head against my leg, with his leg on the other side of my own. My heart dropped so bad. This is not a position he would ever take if he was doing well. He leaned against me for almost ten minutes as we looked up emergency vets.

We think he understood the carrier was coming out, or maybe he was coming out of the stroke itself, because once we put it down he started trying to walk around. Curiously, he was guiding himself by keeping the wall on his left, which we later learned was because he was blind. But once he was on the hard floor, his legs kept splaying out from under him, and again I broke down.

The drive to the vet was maybe ten minutes, but it felt like an hour. Duster hates car trips and he was aware enough to yell throughout this one too, and he did manage to do his usual anxiety poop in the carrier.. The visit itself was apparently four hours long, most of it was waiting, but it felt like maybe forty minutes. I don't now how to explain that. Up until now, every small moment felt like it was dragging, but then the waiting room felt like it flew by? Doesn't make sense to me. Finally the vet did come in and told us he suspected Duster had a stroke, which is when we started putting all the pieces together. The vet confirmed he was blind, that he was deaf (though we've suspected this for a while), that both of his left legs could not be used properly, and that he had a slight heart murmur. We later discovered that he had also lost his sense of smell. I've had a lot of heartbreak in my life the past few years, but nothing prepared me for this. He's my best friend, and he just had a stroke.

The sun was up by the time we were able to fall asleep, and I'm pretty sure marijuana is the only reason we slept at all. I was absolutely dead the next day. The lack of sleep, busy day, and severe emotional distress put me into a really nasty fatigue crash. And we still had to pick him up from the vet that night. Depending on the state of my crash, I can still muster some energy and push through. So I did. I was able to get there, talk to the nurse about his new medications, get him home, and set some stuff up for him. But once that was done, I only got worse. Trying to run on energy you don't have never pays off. I didn't even have the energy to be sad and scared anymore.

Before boxing Duster back up, we spent time with him in a room. He was walking again, but he was constantly walking in clockwise circles losing his legs from under him. He was also screaming his lungs out, and he wasn't responding to anything but touch. When we finally got him back home, he found a spot right in front of the doorwall in my wife's room and just laid there. For days. He lost a lot of weight, but there was evidence he was eating some of the food we gave him. And he was getting up to use the litter box after we set up one that was lower to the ground. So we just let him take that spot since he wasn't going to make any messes in it. I tried to lay with him, but honestly it was incredibly hard to see him like that. He spent nearly all of his time just staring out the doorwall. And when he was moving around it was very slowly and he paused a _lot_. He also does not make tight left turns anymore, instead turning right until he gets there.

As I'm writing, I'm realizing something about his behavior at this point. If he still retained even a tiny bit of vision, I bet that the bright sunlight was about the only thing he could see. He went where he could see anything at all.

I cried a lot. I felt numb a lot. I went to bed each night hurt and confused. Each day Duster improved. He started walking better, he started eating more, he started using the old litter box, he started looking at us again and tracking our movements with his gaze. And I started getting used to the reality that Duster had suffered a brain injury. We finally get to the title of this post, a concept I've been wrestling with since this started. I'm still crying and I'm still scared and heartbroken. And I know I'm just giving an overview of the grief process because I'm doing and feeling other things again while there's this gnawing voice that reminds me my senior cat just had a stroke and he's still struggling.

He has recovered a lot, but he will never be the cat he was just last month (there's another post in here about how I'm struggling with, even before the stroke, Duster being so old and slow these days). He doesn't headbutt me when I kiss him anymore, though he's done it a couple times to my wife. For a bit he yelled at us a lot, but in the past week he's beome quiet again. He can't sit for his food like he was trained. He barely grooms himself and never does the other cats. He will probably always have diminished use of his left legs. He is jumping into our beds again though! But I don't think he'll ever use the cat tree again. One of his favorite spots was at the very tippy top of this nearly seven foot tall tree. He's walking at his normal pace again, but he still pauses sometimes, especially after being medicated.

Duster is doing better, but he's still **not well**. Lately his appetite has disappeared and he's barely eating. His mortality slapped me in the face and all I can think about is how much time he may have left. I had really gotten used to him just being old and slow and sleeping a lot, so I let him do that while I did my own thing. But this reminder that he's on his way out has made me realize every moment matters. So even if he's sleeping in bed I still spend time with him. He seems to enjoy it a lot. His personality is pretty much back and he's the biggest cuddlebug ever again. These moments we've always had together, for a decade and a half, are suddenly so much more precious. Yet I also have to continue on with all the normal boring stuff.

You just do. That's what I mean when I call it "background noise." His stroke, his recovery, his looming death, it all just exists next to everything else. It's background noise, I don't have a chance to linger on any of it for a meaningful amount of time. I just have to keep moving forward and doing things whether I like it or not. And it just sits there fuzzing in the back of my head. He deserves better than that.

When Grief and Trauma Become Background Noise