Free A Cat Named Darwin by William Jordan Page A

to throw myself into this relationship. Not even the eggs and castings of all the fleas who have shared our bed can dampen my spirit.
    Thus Darwin and I became man and cat.

6. Honeymoon Prognosis
    I N THE FOLLOWING WEEKS I bought Darwin expensive specialty foods—nothing but the best for my small friend. He responded by getting fat, eventually compressing the scales at nearly fifteen and a half pounds. In an age when leanness has become something of a medical religion, I felt some concern over this gain in weight, but it gave me such pleasure to watch him revel in his meals that I could not resist giving him large helpings. This in turn allowed me to enter the mindset of Peter Paul Rubens and other Baroque painters: for the first time I understood their tastes in hefty women. A person of weight was a prosperous person, a symbol of power, particularly in an age when good food was a privilege, and Rubens, consummate politician of the royal courts, understood perfectly how to butter his bread.

    Nevertheless, it seemed wise, given my newfound responsibilities, to see what the medical experts said about weight gain and other matters of health, so I bought a veterinary handbook for reference. What I found on its cold white pages was a gallery of horrors, illustrated with weeping wounds and bulging tumors and pus-rimmed eyes. There were failing hearts and damaged kidneys and inflamed bowels and allergic seizures. There were fleas and ticks and mange mites and tapeworms and hookworms and liver flukes. Then of course there were the microbes, including a funereal list of viruses with names like FIP, FPV, FIV, and FeLV (the only omission was RIP). These abbreviations were derived from the medical names: feline infectious peritonitis, feline panleukopenia virus, feline immunodeficiency virus, and feline leukemia virus—a list of doom revealing a dark world of feline pathology that ran exactly parallel to our own, including two retroviruses, FIV and FeLV, that acted much like the retrovirus we humans know as HIV. I didn't dwell on the details, but according to the book, both viruses attacked the white blood cells, particularly the T-cells essential to the immune system; both caused the victim to lose weight and waste away; and both led to all sorts of secondary diseases, including cancers like lymphoma and leukemia.
    I shelved that book, hoping never again to read such a horrible tract and thinking that if cats had nine lives, they had got the short end of the stick. Nine were not nearly enough. Nine lives, however, was a value judgment made by those who have no particular love of cats or who downright dislike them. To those of this persuasion, the cat is a tough, resilient survivor, whose ancestry goes back sixty million years. But when you fall in love with a cat, you take away eight of those lives, leaving it with only one and creating a small, frail creature with little chance of living out a long, healthy life.
    What could I possibly conclude after reading this veterinary tract but that Darwin had to be vaccinated? He also had to have his teeth cleaned. The substance caking his teeth was tartar, and the red line that ran along the base of his teeth was gingivitis, an infection of the gums brought on by tartar buildup. The infection would spread to the jawbone, eventually loosen his teeth, and cause their loss.
    We had returned to the matter of finding a good veterinarian. This time there was no turning back and no time to wait. As Darwin's guardian it was my duty and my loving compulsion to guard his health. But in order to find this ideal veterinarian, Fate would have to intervene.
    About a week later, I conducted a telephone interview with a woman named Bonnie Mader for a column I was writing on the human-animal bond. Bonnie was a professional grief counselor and had founded the first pet-loss hotline at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine. The service had proven so popular that it could not