My Husband Had Brain Surgery, and the Cat Isn’t Handling it Well

A side effect no one warned us about

Not our cat, but a dead ringer for him: Image by Aleksandr Gusev from Pixabay...

“You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn.”

― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Of the five complaints of the aged that T.H. White lists above, my husband and I share the fourth (the one involving evil lunatics) with just about everyone else on Planet Earth these days.

My beloved husband, alas, is also beset with the first one: he trembles in his anatomies. To be specific, his hands. It’s a condition known as essential tremor. It’s not Parkinson’s, for which we are grateful, nor is it fatal.

But it is progressive. Five years ago, it was an annoyance, especially when, as an actor, he had to mix martinis on stage. Live, in front of an audience. Jokes involving “shaken, not stirred” got old fast.

By now, his condition has progressed from being an annoyance to being a confirmed pain in the ass. He can’t type. He conducts a hopeless, nightly battle with the TV remote.

His handwriting, once a thing of quirky elegance, has gone completely to hell. He can’t write checks without courting financial calamity, or fill out forms legibly, and he has to dictate emails and texts.

As for martinis, forget it.

And here’s the thing: he’s good at compensating. If he could press “pause” on his shakies, guaranteeing they wouldn’t get any worse, he could probably make peace with them.

After all, he’s got me to fill out forms.

But essential tremor is progressive, meaning it gets worse. It has done so, and left to its own tremulous devices, it will continue. Some people with the condition have to hold a spoon with both hands while trying to eat. Even then, getting their soup into their mouths can be a dicey proposition.

There are drugs to treat it. My husband has tried them, with ever-increasing doses and their attendant, ever-increasing side effects, with unimpressive results.

And so, after years of neurological consults and considering all the alternatives, he opted for the gold standard in treatment: Deep Brain Stimulation, a surgical procedure in which tiny wires are inserted through the skull down into the brain node from whence come the problem electrical impulses that cause the fidgets.

Then those wires are connected to another wire that travels down along the inside of the neck to an implant lodged beneath the collarbone. The implant acts like a kind of pacemaker for the brain, sending out carefully modulated signals that tell that overactive node to, essentially (see what I did there?), cool it.

It’s a surgery with a long track record and a very high success rate, partly because candidates for the procedure are exhaustively vetted.

My husband went through rounds of exams and testing over the course of a year: physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, therapy therapy, blood work, MRI, CT scan, and a day-long battery of cognitive tests that made the standard “here’s five words, repeat them back to me later” look like a cakewalk.

If you remember what a cakewalk is, or used to be.

It was tedious, but reassuring. This is brain surgery, after all, and not something to approach casually. We both lost a certain amount of sleep over it.

But last Monday, the big day came. We reported to the hospital at 10 AM so he could get through all the pre-op rituals in time to be wheeled, gowned, prepped, and tethered to his IV, into the OR at noon.

The surgery took about four hours, most of which involved carefully positioning the incisions and wires. Which is a good thing: when someone is drilling holes in your skull and threading wires into your brain, you want them to take their time.

He spent one night in the hospital. I could have remained with him the whole night, but when it became clear that the nurse was going to pop in every two hours to repeat a neuro assessment, I headed home to get at least a little sleep.

Put your own oxygen mask on first, and all that.

The next morning, he and his impressively stapled-together head were discharged, along with pills, instructions, and admonitions about what not to do while he recovers.

Here’s where the cat comes in. Or, doesn’t.

Bereft of a dog since our sweet Molly died two years ago, we are down to one pet, our black cat Bandit. Bandit is remarkably chill, friendly to people of all ages and even dogs, as long as they don’t try to chase him.

He is, however, needy. In an emotional sense. And his deepest emotional need is for my husband. Sure, Bandit likes me, even loves me, in his distant, detached feline manner. I have my place in his orbit, but it’s not at the zenith. That spot is reserved for my husband.

Every night when we go to bed, it is a requirement that Bandit spend the first hour or two after lights out cuddled in the crook of my husband’s elbow, where he purrs arhythmically like a V-8 engine that’s missing a piston.

In the morning, Bandit considers it his responsibility to assist my husband with shaving and dressing, mostly by weaving his body between my husband’s legs to ensure his favorite human is still capable of balancing on only two legs.

Although we have a fancy electronic cat fountain that we fill with fresh water daily, Bandit has a strong preference for the water from my husband’s bathroom vanity. This explains why there’s as much cat hair in that sink as there is on the cat.

My husband is not a morning person. Bandit understands that, but only to a point. If our mutually beloved is later than usual to appear, I will be informed with loud, wavering howls.

Alas, cats and sutures are not compatible.

The disruption in Bandit’s treasured routine began the night before surgery, when my husband had to take the first of two antimicrobial showers and then sleep in clean nightclothes on clean bedding, most definitely away from any fur-bearing companions.

Luckily, we keep the door to the guest bedroom closed at all times in case of visitors who are sensitive to cat dander, and everything in there was freshly laundered, dusted, and vacuumed.

Bandit was affronted. Perhaps he was also concerned for the state of our marital harmony. He spent that night, as he has the following nights, shoved up against my legs until about 4:00 in the morning, an hour that signals his campaign to sleep on my nose.

Neither Bandit nor I is really getting quality sleep these nights. For him, it’s not a big loss, since he spends fourteen out of the remaining sixteen hours napping.

But what really gets Bandit’s dander up is that his star human won’t pick him up, or even pet him. Doctor’s orders, but try explaining that to a cat.

It doesn’t matter how much attention I lavish on him; in Bandit’s world, I am but weak tea, a meager substitute.

It has been just under a week since my husband’s surgery, and his recovery is going splendidly. He’s off all pain meds and back to taking two-mile daily walks and despairing over the national news. Last night he even cooked dinner.

The cat, however, is in rough shape. I mean, you wouldn’t know it to look at him; he’s still a yellow-eyed, pudgy lozenge of lazing fur. But he has his ways of expressing his discontents.

With the mysterious feline ability to assume more physical density than his size or weight allows, he chooses the wee hours to go thundering through the house as though it, or his tail, is on fire.

If I don’t promptly respond to his requests for breakfast (which may occur at 6:30 AM, or 4:30 AM, or at any point overnight when he’s particularly bored), he stops yowling at me.

Instead, he starts sharpening his claws and rubbing his dandery hide on my husband’s pillow. I almost admire his level of intentional perversity. Needless to say, keeping him from slithering through every opening, however tiny or temporary, into the guest room as though he were a blob of mercury is an ongoing struggle.

Most unpleasant, however, is how Bandit’s malaise finds expression through his digestive tract. He’s never been particularly prone to hairballs, but now he horks and gasps — usually just when I’ve settled down to sleep or read, and usually just long enough for me to grow worried and come to investigate — whereupon he recovers immediately.

And then there’s the vomiting. Lest you accuse me of kitty negligence, I assure you I have had this checked out. And Bandit is already on a special (and costly) diet, carefully doled out per veterinarian’s orders.

The vet agrees: Bandit’s yakking is emotional in nature. Which should and does summon my compassion, even as I scrape up mucilaginous piles of semi-digested cat food before I’ve had my morning coffee.

My husband’s surgical staples don’t come out for another week. By then, my compassion for the cat’s angst could wear thin, as could Bandit’s tolerance for my hopeless attempts to fill my husband’s cat-coddling shoes.

For both our sakes, let’s hope my husband recovers in record time, at least enough to allow the cat back onto his lap. It will be another month before his brain (my husband’s, not the cat’s) heals enough to have the neurologist activate the implant that will, once properly adjusted, cancel out the tremors.

Then my husband can pick up the cat. And mix me a good, stiff martini.