Someone must have told Nelson it is a wonderful thing to be a Tabby’s Place cat.
He immediately decided that there is only one thing more wonderful: being all the Tabby’s Place cats, simultaneously.
It is no easy feat to be over 130 cats at once. Perhaps a cat of exceptional valor and splendor could achieve this.
But Nelson set out for something greater. He did not only want to be the cats currently here. He had a dream and a destiny.
He intended to be all 4,600+ cats in Tabby’s Place history.
It may sound impossible. But Nelson is not simply a cat of exceptional valor and splendor. Nelson is a brown tabby.
That was all we knew when he arrived. With no fanfare, “the blind brown tabby” came to Tabby’s Place from Animal Control. Nelson did not unfurl a scroll declaring his imperial importance. True greatness walks softly.
He was as meek as the clouds in his eyes, as fragile as the skin on the back of his neck. He held his peace about his life before. It was left to us to shuffle the puzzle pieces.
As best we could tell, Nelson lost his sight and acquired an archipelago of bruises in a head trauma outdoors. Two of his teeth were fractured, and he was unaware of his own handsomeness.
We did our best to describe his strawberry ice-cream nose, his sturdy brown stripes, and the squishy “kitten face” he had kept well into adulthood.
But Nelson was not concerned with how things looked. This brown tabby intended to be the full Nelson: all 4,600 cats worth.
Unfortunately, he decided to begin with 4,600 cats’ worth of medical issues.
There are few feline diseases we have not seen at Tabby’s Place. The combined forces of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Gregory House, and Scooby-Doo could not match our medical team when it comes to unraveling mysteries. They have bested nasopharyngeal stenosis, acromegaly, pillowfoot, and enough FIP to stump the FBI. The paraplegic, paraparetic, and perpetually perplexed find relief and reason to rejoice. Our vet team cures eosinophilic granulomas, exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, and existential crises. This is Tabby’s Place.
Nelson heard about Tabby’s Place.
He got just one detail wrong. He assumed that, the more diseases you need cured, the more you must be loved.
Thus, the siege of symptoms began. First, Nelson developed anemia and dehydration. Supportive care did not stop the trouble train, so we sent him to Dr. Fantastic. (You’ll recall that we use this name as a composite for the whole team of specialists who treat our challenging cases.)
Nelson was declining quickly, but we refused to believe it was too late. After all, it was already too late for our hearts. Nelson may have been a “new” resident, but time curls up like a kitten at Tabby’s Place. Love leaps years in hours. “New” Nelson was our Nelson, and so our hearts were in knots. We did our best to tie them together, so we could all hang on.
But Nelson was barely hanging on.
Dr. Fantastic discovered fluid in Nelson’s abdomen and lungs, but the most urgent matter was that anemia. A blood transfusion offered little improvement. Nelson’s kidneys were large and peculiar, and both atria of his heart were oversized.
The specialists could not coax his glucose up from the danger zone, although Nelson was eating everything in sight as though it were Velveeta-encrusted Sardine Florentine. The last, best hope was to start him on the treatment protocol for FIP, the disease that rarely appears the same twice.
Nelson was not one medical mystery. He was all the medical mysteries.
But in the midst of mystery, one fact is enough: it is a wonderful thing to be a Tabby’s Place cat.
Nelson was not, first and foremost, the broken cat. He was not the blind cat, the wounded cat, or the inscrutable cat.
“Scrutable” is overrated, anyway. If you can “scrute” someone, you are dealing with a stuffed animal or a wooden doll. Far better to have a full Nelson, mystery and all.
Nelson was exactly one cat, which is exactly enough to be the whole wide world to us.
It is a wonderful thing to be a Tabby’s Place cat, and love does its own thing when we are not looking. Nelson’s symptoms began to resolve. Life flowed back into each tabby stripe. He rose up with the strength, not of 4,600 cats, but of precisely one.
Nelson is going to make it. Nelson is going to make us fuller than we ever dreamed.
After all, he is a brown tabby.
It is a wonderful thing to be a Tabby’s Place cat, but there is one thing more wonderful. It is to be a Tabby’s Place person. It is to be Nelson’s person, and Willie‘s, and Regina‘s, and Prescott‘s, and so on, one by wonderful one.
It is a life in full.