Guilt

This morning I had to summon Oates to the door to join Willie for their daily picture. Willie is spread out on his belly as he often is, especially when chewing a bone.  He looks a little sad, perhaps because I'm leaving him.  Oates has his mouth slightly open in a way I would never see except for the brief instant captured in a photo.

Not long after this picture I got a call about Willie's all day test. The good news is that he was negative for what they were looking for. The bad news is that he may be positive for another disease, but what confuses them is that he has no outward symptoms of it, just internal signposts.  Even if he has it, it doesn't sound like a terminal disease, but it may require surgery, which is what we were trying to avoid in the first place.

So, a few more days for the doctors to mull over what happens next. It's very likely he needs more tests.

A Pyrrhic victory, perhaps, but that's the nature of these things. I've tended to not only anticipate the worst but see them through a black and white lens. He's going to live, or he's going to die. Forever or right now. Of course, both of these things are true in the big picture, but maybe I'm looking for immediate certainty when it's really just a long process.

Last night I had drinks with a friend who told me about her best friend, who I'm also friends with. This woman's cat, while old, suddenly died. As her cat became sick out of nowhere, her friend helped her deduce that the cat had gotten into some deadly pollen from flowers left on the floor. Despite the best efforts of the animal hospital, the pollen killed the cat. Something that was meant to beautify her home instead helped turn it into a house of mourning.

The relevance of this grim story to me is that Willie's kidney sickness of a couple weeks ago still has no explanation. Likely theories have been, thankfully for the most part, put to rest. So while we'll never know, it's very possible he ate an aspirin that fell onto the floor.  That could have easily killed him.

Of course even possibly coming close to accidentally poisoning him has me awash in guilt on this oddly chilly and overcast June day.  The fact that I was perhaps sloppy and careless in protecting him is almost too much to contemplate. I can't imagine what that woman is going through. Or perhaps I am doing just that. My guilt about not being a good enough parent to them is a topic I'm sure this blog will revisit more than once.