My old Magna has Feline Immunodeficiency Virus – aren’t scientific names awesome? How they can turn anything personal into something completely neutral! Anyway, FIV is the feline equivalent of AIDS. I can’t say how long Magna will live, it can be from ten days to… nobody knows. She’s all swollen and skeletal, her fur is scruffy and opaque, while she used to be such an imponent looking cat, so incredibly full-bodied, with a silky luminous coat like an ocelot’s. When did she contract the virus? I don’t know, presumably many years ago. She’s is nearly eleven years old.
Feeling anguish is natural. It’s not a matter of responsibility. I don’t feel guilty for her disease. It’s not that I really feel I could have done anything to prevent it. You can’t really prevent a virus like this in a cat living among other cats. It’s that it would actually be sort of reassuring to know where the responsibility lies – it wouldn’t change anything, of course, but it would just be circumscribing facts into a more approachable domain.
Right now the cat is resting behind an armchair. She’s mad at me for bothering her for making her forcefully take her medicine. I can hear her hoarse inhaling and exhaling coming from behind the armchair’s back, I can see her tail moving nervously. Though I can only think she’s being silly for not actively cooperating to her health’s sake to the point of hostility, I can see feeling that bad and having to suffer these kinds of abuses without understanding what’s going on must be quite terrible. To a person in full possession of faculties you can try to explain – though I know from experience many sick persons show no more cooperation than a cat, maybe less, even when you give them reasonable explanations. But a cat only understands nature, and syringes and bad tasting medicines are not nature to them, they are nothing but cruel tortures. All for granting survival for another month in a pitiful state, maybe a little more? Not to mention that every thread of comforting support results to be broken in the middle. Does she understands, does she not? Her purring makes me feel she does to a certain extent. There are times when lack of communicating skills from a species to another is painfully inconvenient.
