Pharoah was born at a truck stop in Fresno. The truck driver brought him, along with his mother and sister, to a foster home in Los Angeles. After several failed attempts to find him a permanent family, Pharoah came to live with us at the age of six months.
I never asked to have a companion and now I am stuck with him. But as he is such a happy little cat and not very demanding, I don’t mind too much.
When he first arrived I noticed he had a small black growth in the corner of his right eye. My human was told this was much bigger when he was born, it had gradually shrunk, and would eventually fall off completely. Instead, it grew bigger. Last year when he was three years old, his eye started oozing large silvery-white tear drops and his energy level seemed to plummet.
As a feral cat he often hid under the rocking chair in the bedroom when visitors were in the house. He began to spend more time under the rocking chair. His human had to put his dinner under the chair so he would eat. After a couple of weeks he recovered. Another few weeks passed and his condition returned. So off he went to the vet.
The vet said he needed three different kinds of medicines three times a day. Even with the help of her friend, there was no way to catch him on a regular basis, let alone administer the meds in his eye, so he stayed in the hospital for a week.
I remember the day he came home. Pharoah was wearing a big floppy collar to keep him from touching his eye. My human locked him in the bedroom and wouldn’t let me in. I guess she was afraid I might attack him after being gone for a whole week, but even I am not that insensitive. In a way, I even missed him.
When she opened the bedroom door, Pharoah came flying out—he was too fast for her to close the door. He charged down the stairs, dashed over to the loveseat by the living room window, plopped down on his favorite pillow, and immediately fell asleep. He didn’t move from that spot for hours. When I checked him out he seemed to have a grin on his silly face that stretched from ear to ear. Obviously, he was very grateful to be home.
My human was supposed to put drops in his eyes every day. But it was a matter of chasing him around the house and trapping him in the bathroom while one person held him down and the other person held his eye open and administered the drops. It was an ordeal for everybody and I could see Pharoah was terrified. So after doing this a few times my human gave up.
Unrelated to this situation, my human had been gradually replacing our usual food (marketed as “vet recommended”) with organic and holistic food. If you know cats, you know we DON’T like change (sorry I had to capitalize that but it was necessary to emphasize it). I was very happy with my food, thank you, both the dry food in the morning and the canned food in the evening. I was NOT happy with this change in my diet. Even though my human mixed the new organic, high protein food in with my beloved high-carb food I could see it in the dish and I picked around it. I would show her she couldn’t mess with me! Well, you try taking cookies away from your kids and replacing them with carrots!
But I have to admit, now I’ve had time to adjust to the situation, I don’t really mind the new food. In fact, I even like some of it.
For a few months after returning from the hospital, Pharoah had relapses with the eye herpes. It was very distressing as about once every week to ten days he would spend an entire day under the rocking chair—not his happy self at all.
Now I am a cat, obviously, and not a veterinarian or dietician. But is it merely a coincidence that since we have both been almost exclusively on our new holistic, high-protein diet, Pharoah has not had a recurrence of his eye problem?
His eye will never heal completely. The black pea is still there, his right eye has lost its luminescence in the dark, and during the day the eye is not as bright as the left eye. But he no longer has a discharge, and best of all, as the happiest cat on the planet, he no longer has down days. To be honest, I envy his perpetual happiness and will probably never figure it out.
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