Adapting Me, Adapting You, Uh-huh

Cammie is adapting to her sightlessness. She doesn’t stay hiding in the bedroom but explores quite a bit. She goes searching for food or water but much of her peregrinations seem to be simply to learn the lie of her newly benighted land. I don’t know if this is true, but the princess appears to wander about more now than when she could see, and I can’t think of any other reason for it.

She sits at windows to sniff the air. If she has any vision at all, it must be very limited, perhaps to vague shapes and movement. She doesn’t use the saddle at the top of the taller bedroom cat-tree anymore. That was where she would view the world most often. Now, her preferred spots are the bed or the towel that serves as a blanket on the floor in a corner of the bedroom.

Since she is most often there, I wanted to provide her with easier access to water. She has climbed up on to the ledge that runs under the bedroom windows, where there has always been a bowl, but that’s a bit of an ordeal for a blind cat. So I have given her a small bowl in the little shelf (intended originally for a vertical computer) of my desk. She resorts to that bowl often, so I feel that she is maintaining her water-consumption adequately. She also still drinks from the larger bowls by the bedroom door and in the corridor.

I think my princess is most unnerved by the other cats. She doesn’t appear to be overly annoyed at constantly bumping her head against walls or the edges of doors; the fact that she does so now more than immediately after her stroke makes me wonder if her sight’s damage increased, or perhaps ‘consolidated’, over the last three weeks. Her movements are slow and deliberate, and she is learning as she goes. But she never liked proximity to the other beasts, and the fact that she can come upon them without warning angers her. Of particular trouble is Raleigh, who is not shy about inserting himself into another’s food. (He is not aggressive about it; he acts as if he thinks the other cat would gladly share. How he survived any time in the wild is beyond me.) However, I am still confining Cammie to the bedroom during my work-days, so she has ample and unshared access to her food, water and litter-box.

I intend to find another set of steps for the bed. Cammie uses the set at the bed’s foot, especially for descending, but she just as frequently leaves by the sides, especially if other cats are on the bed, and this represents a bit of a scary drop for her, executed without grace. If she knows that there is an smoother method of leaving the bed, she will undoubtedly use it.

So we are adapting, she and I. Cammie of course has the more difficult task; mine is to make hers less so. She deserves to have a contented, normal life, even if its normality is somewhat different than what it once was.