“Something’s wrong,” I told Crankenstein this evening, after Muriel joined us on the couch and leaned against me. A half-hour earlier, when I’d gone upstairs to shower, she seemed fine. But there was an unmistakable disturbance in the force — i.e., her joie de vivre — by the time I returned.
“What?” Crankenstein asked, glancing over at us.
“I’m not sure. But something’s wrong.”
We’ve been closely attuned to Muriel’s guarded posture, and her slight hesitations before clambering onto the couch or lowering herself to her belly, since her spinal issues began in late 2019. They’re among the few outwardly visible signs of her lumbosacral disease — a name I rarely specify, lest it conjure evil like the chant from the Candyman films — when it’s well-managed by medication, as it’s mostly been since the spring of 2021.* Whatever was ‘off’ tonight was something more than that, which filled me with dread.
That saga has its own post over at Cranky, so I won’t dwell on it too much here, but Crankenstein and I are always aware that her prodigious good luck in avoiding spinal surgery (so far) and the paralysis that often precedes it could run out at any moment. As she moved around more tonight and we realized she was having trouble with a back leg, my stomach turned to ice. We waited for familiar signs of acute lower back pain to emerge but haven’t observed any yet.
She’s lifted her leg several times to scratch her ear — sometimes connecting and sometimes putting it right back down — and her limp is not consistent, so fingers crossed nothing’s worse in the morning and we’re able to figure out whether it’s possibly just her paw that’s bothering her. To be on the safe side, I gave her the NSAID her vet prescribed last year for back pain, and I’ll sleep downstairs in an effort to keep her from leaping and lunging in the morning when she wants to be fed.
Despite my diminished abilities in other areas, the old me returned like she’d never been gone once we saw the limp. Remembering the long overnight hours I’d spent with Muriel at the emergency vet back in 2019, I assembled a small bag of things that are useful in such a setting — bottled drinks, energy bars, phone charging bricks and cables, reading material — and asked Crankenstein to skip a nightly medication that knocks her out in case we need her help.
Then I gathered my pillow and a non-pajama change of clothes to have at the ready; checked my new non-purse purse (a handsome birthday gift) to make sure it contained emergency levodopa; and opened a small notebook, its cover tastefully adorned with Blanche Devereaux and Kenny Rogers Roasters stickers, to jot down the NSAID’s name, dosage, and what time she took it. Were most of these activities unnecessary? Probably. But if Muriel, who’s now sleeping beside me, was suddenly immobile or in extreme pain, most of those things would immediately slip my mind, so it was a productive distraction from that initial worry.
Before all of this happened, I’d planned to write about worries of a different sort and catalogue some of the insanity that’s currently galloping (as Mortimer Brewster would say) through the ‘queer’ community because of our national political predicament. We’ll have to discuss that, and why it’s a breathtakingly stupid idea to seek sterilization as an act of political defiance, later, because it’s time for me to turn off the lights and get kicked in the ribs by Muriel as soon as I’m almost asleep.
* A bulging knot near her hindquarters that’s only visible from certain angles and with certain postures is another; the vet said it’s normal and has to do with one side having to compensate for the other. She also grooms her nether regions quite relentlessly sometimes, which has to do with uncomfortable or confusing sensations caused by her condition.