as small as a world and as large as alone

4:08am January 31, 2015

Fey in my dark bed at night.

Today, a nurse – a human nurse mind you, not a veterinary nurse – told me to take Fey to the vet. She’s been biting and scratching big holes in my right leg, which triggers my skin picking and leaves me open to infection despite the care we’re giving the wounds.

Anyway she said a cat never behaves that way for no reason. Some people insist they’re “love bites”, but I think that 90% of the time “love bites” means “I don’t know why I’m being bitten and I don’t want it to mean anything bad about what I’m doing.” (And in an encore, I’ll pull more numbers out of my arse!) The nurse thinks she may be in pain. I know she’s got chronic pain from a nerve that goes from her spine to her back right leg. I know she’s got something wrong with one of her ears. So fixing the ear problem could possibly go a long way here. She needs to be sedated, it’s so deep in the ear. I know it’s bad because she lets me stick my finger all the way inside her ear when it itches. Which is not something she would normally ever put up with.

I’ve got a sinking feeling though that the problem isn’t medical in nature. It’s good to rule out medical causes though, always.

But I think, honestly, that there’s something Fey desperately wants to communicate, and I simply don’t speak Cat well enough to understand. When she bites me, she yowls or growls first. She follows me around the house and then goes for my right leg – always the right leg, only twice the left one. The right leg has holes all through it, and she bites me through the holes. They bleed badly. One time se bit me through a hole that bled so much it slicked up the floor and i fell on my butt.

I know she’s trying to tell me something.

I know cats have far more complex desires than food, water attention, and play. All of whichshe gets plenty of. They also have more problems to tell you about than just medical ones. The way people talk about her when I discuss this, reminds me of the way people talk about autistic children’s"behavior problems" – they assume that the desires and needs and motivations of the person doing the violence are ridiculously simple, and that it’s just a matter of finding the right one. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even when our thinking patterns are simple (for lack of a better word), our motivations can be as complex as anybody’s. And not taking that seriously.

I’m taking that seriously.

I’m also, along with my doctor, taking the wounds seriously: Cleaning and ntibiotic ointment several times a day, to try and avoid “oral” (really, feeding tube, but it’s no better that way) antibiotics. I take too many antibiotics as it is, because I aspirate easily and have bronchiectasis which means I get pneumonia easily and find it hard to clear infections. Whichleads toa vicious cycle of infections causing the bronchiectasis to worsen, causing more infections. And I have no pretenses that, as a multiply disabled autistic person, anyone would consider me eligible for a lung transplant. So our goal is to simultaneously keep my bronchiectasis mild while avoiding creating superbugs. Which is a tall order (people with more severe bronchiectasis spend their entire lives on prophylactic antibiotics, and i do not want to reach that point). But we’re trying.

Also complicating things is my immunosuppressant – CellCept (for myasthenia gravis) – and my possible additional immunosuppression from dexamethasone, a steroid i take to replace the cortisol my body isn’t making due to severe secondary adrenal insufficiency.

So I’m… what is it my doctor calls me… medically complicated? But that doesn’t mean we don’t try to keep me alive and as healthy as I get. He’s never given up on me, neither have my absolutely wonderful pulmonologist, neurologist, and endocrinologist. I’m just glad to have an excellent team of doctors working on my side. I didn’t used to have that, and it’s not exaggerating to say i would have died without the intervention of these doctors.

Anyway, I’m doing my best with the cat bites as I can. And so are my doctors. So, again, please don’t tell me how bad infections can get, what cat scratch fever is, how toxic cat bites can be (had to go on antibiotics before when she was on Prednisone and delivered me bites as hard a she could offer when I tried to give it to her (and I was immunosuppressed from being on Prednisone myself – we even got our meds at the same pharmacy), etc. For the moment i’m doing everything right, and things are getting better. The worst infection is getting smaller, both the hole in the skin (still looks like a tiny pizza) to the red area around it has gone from five inches on all sides to about an inch on two sides and practically nothing on the other two.

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