She is our inspiration, our miracle
girl. Thirteen years ago, on the shoulder of a rarely used country
road, in -25 degree Celsius weather, I found her, dying. She had not
crawled there. She had been dumped there, for a painfully slow death. She was just a baby, an infant kitten, maybe 8-9 weeks old. In It Was a
Brutal, Barbaric Way to Die, May, 2012, I wrote
about our first meeting on that frigidly cold morning. How could
anyone leave any baby animal to die like that? Well, we now know many
do. Pets are society's easy victims and its scapegoats.
We kept the tiny
kitten, after her week's stay at the emergency hospital, where the
bill exceeded $600. (Only 50% of it was to be paid, thanks to the
generosity of the doctor on duty.) The kitten's new family was fascinated by
her 'charm' and 'insatiable' thirst for knowledge. She snapped at all
of us. But we waited. (For better or for worse, she was ours, forever.) Her
night-time antics in the bedroom, shared by an adult 'brother' made
for many sleepless nights until she realized the evenings were not
hers for adventure, while the rest of us slept. Her walks across the
keyboard computer, in the wee hours of the morning, did not make for
a happy roommate. But there was no other place to keep her confined,
till day time, our time, arrived. Eventually, she honed her kitty cat
skills and began to like her new home, a safe predictable place in which to be.
In 2012, her health
status changed, rocking her world and ours, incorporating a new
debilitating chronic disease about which I have written. She became
this soldier of misfortune, dealing with this ongoing menace:
hyperthyroidism. Standard protocols, albeit costly, were dismissed
outright. There were risk factors inherent. A new diet arrived on
the scene,10 years in development, to re-mediate her health crisis. It
gave us hope. And it did for two years when suddenly Tiggy began to
reject this special diet food, the only food she could eat. (A dry version was eaten at
night). All she wanted was iodine-rich dinner choices, death
sentences in disguise. The doctor and I could only hope she would
live long enough to rethink her ghastly food decisions. We reluctantly went along with her plan.
High iodine choices
such as her much sought-after fish and seafood dinners made her
happy, in the short term, until she began to vomit. Her body was 'talking' to her. Giving her what
she wanted not what she needed was creating her dietary dilemma. But at least she
was eating. Maybe, she knew something we did not! Forcing her to eat her special food was simply an
invitation to starvation. She was doing what her body was telling her to do. By the time
she dropped to 4 pounds, from a healthy lifetime weight of over 10
pounds, in early September 2014, I sensed the end was near. She was frail, bony and meowed in a barely audible whisper. She was
also, inadvertently, creating another health crisis - fatty liver
disease, a fatal assault on her liver. She was going to die! I mourned her impending death.
Then Greek yogurt was introduced and like magic, the fermented food changed everything. By Christmas of 2014, she had stabilized to 9
pounds, a weight she has maintained till today.The owner of Global Pet, Keswick, Ontario had saved her life with his yogurt suggestion.
Two weeks ago,
Tiggy stopped using the litter box for liquid waste. Something new
had happened. But what, I wondered? (Tiggy is in her 14th
year.) Had her thinking changed to make her behave in a more
acrimonious manner? In a room, with carpet, I began to shudder. Was
'missing' the litter box her way of getting even with me? We had
always treated her with respect, kindness and love. Was she trying to tell
me something? Was she arthritic? In pain? She seemed fine, as far as
I could see. A quick visit to the doctor for blood and basic urine
test revealed her thyroid gland, the troublemaker at the bottom of
her multi-year 'disease', was in great shape. It had never been
better! It was in the 40 range, a number in the middle range of
normal, never before recorded. We were thrilled but she had lost a pound in 15 days. Such a
dichotomy. Even the doctors were fazed by it all. Yogurt, stopped
months earlier, was now re-introduced to help with weight gain.
It worked. Within two weeks she had regained nearly all her lost
weight and was now using the litter box, most of the time. Her
mystery continues.
Throughout the last
several months, I have been 'dry' brushing my girl, daily, a simple
treatment option lauded for its health benefits, on the human body,
by reducing cortisol production of the adrenal glands, for 5-8 hours.
If dry brushing was good for us then it might be great for animals,
too, I mused. Tiggy loved the brush on her head, in its gentle downward
motion, towards her neck and heart. From the top of her tail, the brush was
brought backwards, towards the heart, in the gentle sweeping motion she
adored. She seemed to bask in the warmth of the brush strokes on her
body. Had dry brushing relaxed both her, her thyroid and reduced
stress on her body? Our beautiful girl has not vomited in over six weeks, with only 7 episodes since the beginning of the year! It is no longer a concern in our aging kitty. Healthy cats do it. But our miracle girl does not. Had dry brushing, this new health protocol, affected her
stress levels thereby helping produce better lab results? Momsey does not know.
But Momsey believes it so. Dry brushing is her new addiction. It should be ours.
Our Tiggy has been
a fractious kitty, from the beginning, an animal who liked no one and
tolerated me. But over the years she embraced the family culture of
two people totally devoted to her well being. She taught us to never
to give up on her, even when death came knocking, several times. She
became an experiment, an anomoly. I was never what one might call a
cat person, until I met my Tiggy, our miracle girl. It is amazing how
duty to a defenseless creature, one frigidly cold morning, years earlier,
made us believers in a new species, in the love of 'just a cat'.
She should have
died, in that -26C temperature morning, on a lonely stretch of
country road, in 2003, as a former tiny discarded litter mate, then of slow starvation from her death-defying food choices with the sometimes fatal, fatty liver disease, lurking nearby, in the Spring of 2014. But as her
hyperthyroidism and its demonic affects on her health, took hold, she began to listen. I watched. I listened. I learned. Happy endings are possible.
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