HOW CATS HEAL<\/p>\n
I was relaxing in bed a few evenings ago, watching a\u00a0mindless TV series, when I heard a thundering bang. It sounded like a metal statue\u00a0or a huge book case had fallen just outside my bedroom door. My cat, Star, let\u00a0out a terrible cry and I jumped up see what had happened. I found her lying on\u00a0the ground, moaning. I looked up and realized she had fallen straight down, about\u00a0fifteen feet, from one of her favorite perches on a living room shelf. I know,\u00a0cats don’t fall. Their balance is impeccable. But she must been asleep, turned over,
fallen the long distance and landed hard on her right back leg.<\/p>\n
I was devastated as I watched her try to limp away. She was\u00a0holding up her leg, she couldn\u2019t stand up, so I took her in my arms and palpated her\u00a0legs. I wondered if she had broken something but she didn’t flinch when I touched\u00a0her. She was horribly freaked out, so was I, so I put her to bed with me. She\u00a0fell asleep immediately but when we got up in the morning, she couldn’t bear her\u00a0weight on her leg. I called a vet who couldn’t see her due to Covid (?) so we
ended up at a pet emergency hospital. They wouldn’t allow me to go into the\u00a0back of the hospital with my cat. You guessed it. Covid again, and seven hours\u00a0and a thousand dollars later, I found out that her x-rays hadn’t shown any breaks\u00a0or contusions and the ultrasound didn’t show any fluid build up. That was a\u00a0blessing.<\/p>\n
I was overjoyed to have Star back home, but I was left with\u00a0a bad taste in my mouth. The receptionists at the emergency unit had been
nightmares, trained poorly or not all, uninterested or unable to handle anxious\u00a0pet owners whose animals required emergency treatment. When I asked them for\u00a0updates during that interminable day, they acted like I was a royal bother to\u00a0them \u2013\u00a0 but that\u2019s not what this piece is about.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s about watching my cat heal. I\u2019m in awe as Star relaxes\u00a0and surrenders to what happened to her. I feed her on the bed, she eats well,\u00a0she yawns, stretches, and dozes. I carry her to the litter box and back to bed,\u00a0where she licks my hand and herself for a while and goes back to sleep. I\u2019ve heard\u00a0that our best healing happens when we’re asleep, a time when all of our systems\u00a0are at rest and can focus energy to the part of the body that needs it. That\u2019s\u00a0what cats do. They rest with no anxiety or guilt. It\u2019s a miraculous thing that
we\u2019re all built to heal, but going through it is hard for us human beings. When\u00a0we get hurt, we put ourselves through the ringer. We\u2019re anxious, frightened and\u00a0crabby, filled with worst case scenarios and guilty that we might have done\u00a0something to put ourselves at risk. How could we have been so stupid? When will
this be over so we can start running around again?<\/p>\n
Granted, we have many things to do to keep our lives\u00a0together and our pets don\u2019t, but we could do a lot more self-soothing and a lot\u00a0less blaming and wishing we were somewhere else. Cats don’t have guilt. Or\u00a0regret. They don’t self-flagellate. They soothe themselves, they live in the\u00a0now, sleeping when they’re tired, eating when they’re hungry and sleeping as\u00a0much as possible when they\u2019re hurt. They\u2019re blessed with the inability to think\u00a0into the future, to tell themselves stories with bad endings, and to wish\u00a0something else was going on. They just relax and heal and we could all learn a\u00a0lesson from them.<\/p>\n
Healing comes when we meet our wounded places with\u00a0compassion. These words from Stephen Levine are the heart of this process, both\u00a0physical and mental. He said that healing is bringing mercy and awareness into\u00a0that which we have held in judgment and fear. When we\u2019re in pain, it\u2019s not a\u00a0good idea to beat ourselves up and cause ourselves more pain. If you had a\u00a0broken leg, you wouldn\u2019t keep kicking it. So why would we thrash ourselves when
something bad happens to us. The truth is that we are all broken and wounded.\u00a0It’s the nature of being a human being who participates in life. But when we begin\u00a0growing strong in the places where we\u2019re broken, we see the gift that taking\u00a0care of ourselves offers.<\/p>\n
Being wounded asks for our kindness. The more I stroke my\u00a0cat, the more she relaxes and the better she seems to feel. I\u2019d like to have
the same compassion for myself instead of being anxious and frightened and\u00a0wondering, \u201cAre we there yet?\u201d Getting better is a natural process, our bodies\u00a0are equipped to do it, but it occurs in its own time. And it doesn’t happen in\u00a0a straight line. It had dips and peaks. Yesterday, I found my cat at the top of\u00a0the stairs. She had walked up by herself. Today, however, she doesn\u2019t want to\u00a0leave the safety of the bed. Whatever her internal instinct tells her, she\u00a0follows it. But that isn’t always true for us. I know a woman who went dancing\u00a0on high heels a few weeks after she had a hip replacement. It added weeks onto\u00a0her healing process and she never put two and two together. I know a woman whose\u00a0doctor told her she was dehydrated and she refuses to drink water. I know a man
who injured his knee but he refuses to take a break from playing tennis and it\u00a0keeps getting worse.<\/p>\n
Human beings are pretty stubborn, sometimes it serves us well, but at other times we simply refuse to do what\u2019s good for us. I\u2019m not sure why. I see the wisdom in something my friend told me. He pointed out that people don\u2019t like doing what is inconvenient, like seeing a doctor when they need to or on the other end of the spectrum, refusing to use turn signals on the road. All it takes is a lift of one finger and people simply won\u2019t do it. Go figure.<\/p>\n
Islamic Persian scholar, Rumi, said, \u201cThe wound is where the\u00a0light enters you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Buddhist poet and singer, Leonard Cohen, said, \u201cThere is a\u00a0crack in everything. That\u2019s where the light gets in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally, theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, who lived with ALS for\u00a0years, said, \u201cWhere there is life, there is hope.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is healing at the end of convalescence. There is\u00a0relief at the end of pain. When the clouds part, the sun shines through. We
don’t know how long it will take or how it will occur but if we work with\u00a0ourselves instead of against us, we see that the body is a miraculous thing.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
HOW CATS HEAL I was relaxing in bed a few evenings ago, watching a\u00a0mindless TV series, when I heard a thundering bang. It sounded like a metal statue\u00a0or a huge book case had fallen just outside my bedroom door. My cat, Star, let\u00a0out a terrible cry and I jumped up see what had happened. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2171,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2173,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2172\/revisions\/2173"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}