Yearling

April 5, 2010 was the arrival date. When planning to relocate my life to Las Vegas, I couldn't see beyond that day. No future existed, at least none that I could imagine. All I knew was that I would be living with Martin and eventually pursuing my divorce. I don't remember much of that first day other than traversing the Virgin River Gorge in Arizona and the awestruck beauty and torrential terror therein. That trip felt much like the crucible forging my new life from the old one. Then there was the Nevada border, the desert, and the city I would call home.

I hid in his room the first day or so. Every morning for a week Martin and I made love before he left for work. I gradually explored the apartment, the streets outside, the twisting knots of unfamiliar roads. I made an ever widening space for myself in his life until discernible elements were not just ours, but mine. I gathered supplies, I secured a job and I colored my hair. We found some habits to fall into, and others to break out of. He bought a house for us to live in. We chased adventure, we nursed illness, and generally figured out how to exist together.

I've lived here for exactly one year.

The biggest decision of my life is still easily the best I've ever made and I regret absolutely nothing.

Happy Anniversary.

Reset

The liquidation doldrums perpetuated an environment of illness and negativity. A shift would not pass without anxiety manifesting as nausea and headache, both of which occurred with heavy regularity at one of my previous jobs in Ohio. Back then, such reactions reached a boiling point every six to eight months or so, sending my non-insured carcass to the Emergency Room to rack up a few thousand dollars of treatment checking my heart, my digestive track and my head. It was a documented excuse not to go to work, which I think was the point.

I love my job at Borders. I do not want it to be another awful job.

Then my cat got sick on my birthday. Much as I could not afford my own health care in Ohio, I couldn't swing vet care for my girls, either. Anytime they took ill, I panicked and through myself into research and home remedies and treatment. Thankfully, they never took so sick as to require much more than mommy's TLC, but the fear remained that one day, some day, they would.

I'm good at taking care of pets. I bathed, fed and exercised a geriatric rat every day during her convalescence and even managed to restore some of her mobility when she was paralyzed. I diagnosed my girls with worms back when I was single, bought medication online and wrestled them each down twice to administer drugs. This time around, I hydrated Ryoko with Pedialyte and an oral syringe, though I would up wearing most of it.

But she didn't get better, threw up for days and stopped eating and drinking entirely. So Martin and I took her to the vet.

While waiting in the examination room, Ryoko slipped on the steel table, fell on her face and broke her tooth off. Having been up since 3 AM and haunted with her illness for a few days, I promptly broke into hysterics and only retained control to talk to the vet. Eventually, we brought her back for X-Rays, blood work and hospitalization. She stayed there for two days.

The road to recovery stretches on before us now that she is home. Martin and I have to dose her with three different medicines, twice daily. Yesterday we planned a short road trip and dinner with friends, but I canceled to watch her. (We were supposed to spend the long weekend in LA to celebrate our anniversary, and canceled that, too.) But even as I write this, she's curled up between my arms and the laptop, which she hasn't done since before taking ill.

And I could care less about work. I've secured my transfer and the store should be in her last week, but I'm not worried about it anymore. No headaches, no nausea, no desperate fear of being there. My concern and attention for my kitty simply trumped all that fretting and blew it out of my awareness.

I'll never be thankful for my cat getting sick. I've put too many pets in the ground to embrace that sentiment. But my darling kitty did manage to put the world into a better perspective for me, and I feel stronger for it.

And for the rest of her days, she's going to be spoiled rotten. But that's no surprise.