Cat Surgery

I watch too many hospital procedurals. So many, from the ER of my youth to the House of today, that I am familiar with the medical language, the red-tape bureaucracy, the emotional dilemmas. It is something else entirely when you, in real life, are presented with a document that informs you that your loved one will be in the best possible care but you still have to sign a consent waiver indemnifying the doctors if anything goes wrong resulting in injury, disability, or death. It is an impossible signature to make.

Even if that loved one is your cat.

My darling boy, my sweet, loving, cherished one had surgery today. He was under anesthesia for four hours. Longer than they anticipated so he was dosed with additional drugs halfway through. He loves me. Completely. I am his favorite thing in the world and I signed a piece of paper saying that it was okay if they killed him. That I understood it was, as all surgeries are, a risky procedure. Blue ink on a fresh laser print legal document and then they took him away, all smiles and reassurances, and I left him there all day.

He is fine. The surgery went well, despite the delay, and he was reported to have been an ideal patient. All of the nurses and doctors love him. One of them told me that she was jealous that my cat was so sweet and loving. But he loves me. And I can't help but feel that I did him wrong somehow, even though he needed the surgery and would have been a great deal of pain very shortly had he not had it.

It does make me worry about kids, though. It was hard for me to sign that piece of paper. Hard for me to say goodbye. I am a natural born pessimist. I always assume the worst, which means that I am rewarded with good news a great deal of the time. But feeling as if I wouldn't see him again, believing, in a horrible part of my chest, that he was being taken away in a maroon carrier to be laid to rest on an operating table was painful. It was awful. If my cat, even though I love him dearly and would leap in front of a Mack truck to save him, elicited this much of a response, my children will drive me to insanity. My own flesh and blood will permanently raise my hackles in defensive mode. My soccer mom arm will eternally be outstretched in support of the appropriately worn seat belt. My momdar will sense every broken curfew, every white lie, every broken heart with stripped down sensory reactions.

Parenthood is going to be a bitch.

(Side bar to my parents, there is not a little one on the way, this is merely conjecture. Sorry if I got your hopes up.)