My cat Bitey who is FeLV+ lost the use of his back legs a little over five months ago. We spent a boat load of money trying to make him better, to little avail. Finally we stopped all treatment, because it was making him miserable and putting us in the poor house.
To compensate for the loss of his four-leggedness, Bitey learned to drag his body around using his front paws, which have become freakishly strong. His withered back legs often lay straight like two sticks at a 90 degree angle to the rest of his body. Sometime they catch on half open doors and I have to go "unhook" him.
His back legs come to life occasionally in the form of random spasms (usually while being bathed in the kitchen sink). Sometimes you can hear the back legs thumping against the wood floors in the next room.
His magnificent orange raccoon tail, so evocative of his mood in the past, has been silenced.
To relieve Bitey's burdensome mode of travel, we often grab his tail, hold it upright, and lift his back legs off the ground so that he can walk, jog or sometimes flat out gallop wherever he choses. Most often he uses the opportunity to rub up against our legs and purr. This is lovely, but we often end up a bit tangled.
Bitey's most favored destination is, of course, the food bowl. He's trying to bulk up his rapidly thinning frame. His food bowl sits on a blue kitchen mat. Every time I'm around while he eats, I place his back legs in a standing position on the blue mat. In the beginning of his sickness he could barely hold his body in a sitting position, and would let his backside flop over into a resting position.
Lately however, things have been different. For the past few days at the food bowl he has supporting his full weight on his back legs, which are almost fully extended. The moment he tries to move, flop. But there is a certain beauty in seeing him standing so tenuously, head in food bowl, crunch, crunch, crunching away.
This was progress, I thought...could there be a real change taking place in the Body Bitey? Then, on the morning of Boyfriend's Birthday, I took out Bitey's favorite toy. Two tiny rolls of cardboard attached to a long curving wire (cost to produce: 2 cents / cost to customer at petco: $6.50)
Bitey has always been deeply enthralled with this toy. When the little cardboard thingies were dangled above his head, he would leap high in the air, like a third baseman defying gravity to snare a rocket. He'd also make that odd "ack, ack, ack" predator noise...the cat equivalent of a duck tooters.
Now, in his limited mobility phase, the most he can do is whack at the toy while lying on his back. But on B-friend's B-day, he was so focused on the toy that I saw him suddenly jerk his whole body off the floor and into the approximation of a crouch. His front paws did most of the work, but the back legs somehow got into a normal sitting position, all by themselves.
For a brief moment, real hope, which I had been carefully burying all this time, exploded in my heart. Was Bitey healing? Were his nerves magically regenerating? Had the tumor, (or whatever) in his spine shifted to a less damaging position? Could this have all been just been a bad, wildly overpriced dream? I scratched him behind his ears, under his neck and looked in his eyes like a proud mama. I smiled as he revved up the purring machine. Then I looked in his eyes again. One of his pupils was fully dilated. The other, befitting the daylight, was a mere slit.
Bummer.
Turns out this is a common neurological sympton of cats with spinal injuries and FLV. And after a day, the pupils evened out and he was fine. But it was a sobering reminder of Bitey's precarious status (as if, with the bladder expression, bandages, and wee wee pads, I could forget).
Yet today, at feeding time, with his legs propped up in a standing position, supporting his own weight, I saw something I haven't seen five long months; a slowly swishing tail. Bitey's tail, which had lain limp and grounded for so long, was elevated and slowly dancing.
And watching that small private miracle, hope returned, refreshed.
