David McElroy

Amelia died at 2:34 p.m. Monday. She was in my arms purring for her last half hour of life. She didn’t seem to be in pain. She simply stopped breathing.

She was the ultimate lap cat. For the last couple of years, she and Sonny had constantly competed for lap time. After I unexpectedly lost Sonny about a month ago, she had me all to herself again. For several weeks, so took advantage of it, jumping into my lap and purring loudly anytime I sat at my desk.

I’ve told the story of how she came to live with me 13 years ago, so I won’t repeat that. And I wrote this morning about how the animals I’ve rescued have really done more to rescue me than the other way around, so I won’t belabor that point, although it might be more true of her than of some of the others. So I’ll just say a few things about this particular little girl who has meant so much to me.

My experience is that male cats are sweeter and friendlier and that the females are more skittish and untrusting. (I’ve found something of the reverse with dogs, where females are sweeter and males can tend to be more aloof.) In this respect, Amelia was more like a male cat. She quickly trusted me and wanted a tremendous amount of attention. She was the first animal who came to live with me after I divorced 13 years ago, so she was always something of a line of demarcation between the past and the future for me. (Of my remaining cats, only William was with me when I was married.)

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For the last five days or so, my life has revolved around the health of a small cat. I haven’t slept much and I haven’t gotten too much done during the day. My time has been devoted to helping a little girl named Amelia get well.

When she received fluids and had other treatment at a vet clinic Friday, she had to stay overnight. They warned me that she was so weak that she probably wouldn’t make it through the night. But when I called at 7 a.m., she was alive, although still very weak. They told me I could keep watching her and hoping for a miracle or I could put her to sleep. They didn’t necessarily encourage that, but it was clear that they didn’t believe she had a chance. I couldn’t give up on her.

The vet didn’t want me to move her home until the last possible second Saturday, so I picked her up right as the clinic closed at noon. In talking with the vet and the vet tech who was working with her, neither believed she could make it through the weekend.

After a weekend of ups and downs — progress and then collapse — all I can say is that she’s still with me. I’m still doing all I can to give this little girl a chance to recover.

Some people don’t understand the intense connection that some of us feel for cats and dogs. And some people love animals, but don’t understand why some of us are so intent on rescuing the ones who aren’t wanted instead of getting some “pure” animal that’s been bred to be “perfect.”

But I find that there are many people like me — who also have a need to rescue the unwanted and unloved animals. Some of them are a little crazy. (OK, some of them are a lot crazy.) But they all have hearts that are bigger than their homes. And I think most of us are rescuing ourselves by rescuing the unloved and unwanted.

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It wasn’t a big deal when I first noticed my ankles and feet swelling. I’m not sure if it started the middle of last week or over the weekend. It didn’t seem like a big enough deal to pay attention to at first.

But by Monday, the swelling was painful. My shoes felt as though they were about two sizes too small. It hurt to walk. I still didn’t think it was a big deal, but it was irritating enough by Wednesday to go visit a friend who’s a doctor. I just wanted him to tell me how to make the swelling go away.

My friend took a look at the swelling and pressed his thumb into part of the skin on each ankle and he timed how long it took the “pit” to go away. It was taking far longer than it should, he said, and that made it a “pitting edema.”

“Is it going to kill me?” I asked jokingly.

“Well, pitting edema is a classic sign of possible congestive heart failure,” he said. And he wasn’t joking.

For just a minute, I felt as though I was in another doctor’s office 18 months ago when a specialist told me that I had breast cancer and needed immediate surgery. For that minute, I relived what it felt like to experience the worry and loneliness I’d felt then. (I wrote about the experience of surgery this past January, on the one-year anniversary.) It felt as though someone was waving a red warning flag at me.

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