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I've always had cats, sometimes a lot of them, like when "the girls" (my daughters) got "the girls" (their two cats) whom became pregnant before I realized they were old enough to be fixed. We had kittens coming out of our ears.My cat Tigre (yep, after winnie the pooh and tigre too) came from Fla. back to Seattle with me, a security blanket when my first baby died and I broke up with my husband and decided to join Boeing's FLT SIM dept instead of going back into the miitary to work on simulators in the AirForce.
It was my first experience with grief and the pain was so overwhelming that I literally lay on the floor for a week and a half, only getting up to drink coffee made from the tap, throw it up, and use the bathroom. Tigre would lay with me, push his nose under my hand to pet him, make me see that there was a world outside of that balloon of excruciating pain that surrounded me. As I lay on my stomach on the floor he would lay on my back and purr, comforting me, showing me that all was not gone. I have always been a thinker, researching everything, especially those things I was considering doing, like smoking pot back after I had gotten out of high school, it was 1970 and people were doing lots of different drugs. I read up on it, tried it and decided it was not for me because I didn't have complete control over my mind. I had wanted children ever since my friend Jackie had a daughter when I was 16. She brought her at 9 months) to my 17th birthday sleep over. I had things to do in life before having children, but had known that they would be an important part of my life. I tend to dream of things that I think a lot about, and having children was no different. While in my Gothic Novel reading stage I had decided on the names Jessica and Jeremy for my kids, read the names in one of the books I had read.
I had dreamed of Jessica's birth many times, the odd thing being that (in the dreams) the doctors would always tell me that I had already given birth, I would insist that I had no children at home.
When I had become pregnant I knew it was Jeremy, a boy. No question, I told everyone his name and insisted they do the same. I had "the dream" again a few times when I was pregnant, I came home to Seattle from Florida to visit my family . One night I woke up screaming, Mom came in and I voiced my concern, I said "this baby isn't going to make it, I KNOW" it! As I few back to Florida, I was having contractions, I suppose I could have gotten off at O'hare and gone to a hospital, but I though they were those brackston-hicks contractions I had read about. They were not. In a walking, talking state of shock (similar to the way I felt when I became convinced that Y2K would be TEOTWAWKI (yes, after reading Gary North's site), I went into the hospital the morning after arriving back at Homestead in Labor. The hospital personnel kept insisting I was further along in my pregnancy than I was because I was so big. I knew to the day when I conceived, I had planned it, researched for years about reproduction.
-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), July 15, 2000
(Second half, since the entire thing will not go through)Good old military assembly line doctor would not listen and try to stop my labor, this was before ultra-sound, he (without telling me) broke the water bag to bring on the baby. As soon as the fluid was out, my stomach collapsed around the baby and they could see the small size. I was on a bed, they didn't think I would deliver soon (or think) and I was gripped by a hard contraction. I did a backbend, and asked "what the hell was that?" The chaplain was there and told me. The Doctor was busy delivering another baby and wouldn't come in, I told the nurse to get his ass in now that the babies' head was coming out. Amazing what we, as women know about our bodies, even without experience. Two or three contractions later, there he was, Jeremy. He was crying-those cries still haunt me 23 years later. I reached out and touched him and was rewarded with getting my hand slapped by the nurse who said I was not supposed to touch him, I would contaminate him. They has the neonatal Doctors from the U of Fla. there and after pushing as much blood from the cord into him they cut it and started "working on him". They took me out of there as fast as possible. Two hours later he was dead. If he had been born today he would have survived, with few if any problems. There is a lot of things about that and what happened after that brought me to this point 5 months later laying on the floor, unable to move from overwhelming emotional pain. Not worth going into here, I've gone through them hundreds of times and "resolved" them to the best of my ability. I considered killing myself, realized I didn't want to be dead, just wanted the pain to stop hurting so badly. The last night on the floor, Tigre, my cat was purring in my ear and I dreamed of Jessica, my little girl, playing with him. When I woke up I had somehow regained some strength and decided to live, things would get better and I would have to live if Jessica were to ever have a life.
I have a picture of Jessica playing with Tigre that I took five years later. Tigre is gone now, wondered off to die alone as cats ae wont to do. I will always be grateful to him for letting me know that there is life after adversity.
-- Cherri (sams@brigadoon.com), July 15, 2000.
Cherri--That was an eloquent testimony to human love and courage. (and to cats). Thanks.
-- Lars (lars@indy.net), July 15, 2000.
Beautiful story, Cherri!I'll follow it up with a lighter one: when I first moved to Columbus in the spring of '98, I had to work 80 hours a weeek and didn't have the time to meet my neighbors. I also locked Mr. Phib, my 4-year-old tabby inside, because I was afraid he'd get lost since I hadn't worked in the yard yet and left my scent.
But Mr. Phib had other plans. One afternoon, about four days after I moved in, we had a heat wave and he managed to squeeze out one of the bedroom windows that I had cracked open. At that time, there were several teenage young ladies living next door, and they were out sun bathing on their back porch.
Mr. Phib quietly wandered over. According to their mom, one of the gals had left the top strings to her bathing suit untied (it was one of those lace-up-the-back thingies from the early 80s). Mr. Phib decided that the tie blowing in the breeze was worthy of attack, so he came out of nowhere and pounced on it, scaring all the ladies.
Fortunately, they were also cat owners and had a good laugh about it. They kept Mr. Phib on the screened in part of their porch until I returned home, guessing correctly that he had escaped -- their mom had seen him out the windows.
Mr. Phib is now and "indoor-outdoor" cat, but I haven't heard of him pouncing on anymore sun bathers.
-- (kb8um8@yahoo.com), July 15, 2000.