8:16pm April 10, 2012

Fey is being incredibly nuzzly and sweet right now.

What makes it amazing is she’s very obviously in enough pain that I wouldn’t blame her at all if she was biting at me. Which she was a minute ago because my arm was touching her bad leg. But then suddenly she flipped over instead and started nuzzling my face in a loving way.

I’ll get to my own day and how it went after Fey gets out from in front of my iPad, where I started writing. To write on it now I’d have to touch her bad leg again and from the way she’s looking I don’t think I ought to do that. Her fur keeps rippling and her leg has been twitching hard any time it touches anything.

With cats, as with humans, a lot of people have a highly distorted sense of what a life “in constant pain” means. Both Fey and I live that life and we both clearly value being alive. I hate to think what could have happened to her in the hands of someone who couldn’t perceive that. Or someone who couldn’t tell she was in pain at all and saw this as bad behavior.

I almost didn’t get to adopt her. If I’d been five minutes later she’d have ended up with a group of boisterous frat boys. I can’t imagine that going well, especially how fragile and timid she was at first – and the horribly possessive-of-a-thing way they talked about her in the pound. I hope if anything ever happens to me, someone can find a good home for her with someone who respects cats and understands enough about pain and disability in cats not to harm her.

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