The miracle of Henry

Henry is our blind cat. He wasn't blind at first. He and his sister had been abandoned at the EHHS fieldhouse and were very dehydrated when someone rescued them and took them inside the school. At the time I only had one cat and one dog, and was considering getting another cat. My Mom told me about Henry (named after Henry Aaron, because of my love for baseball and the fact that he was found near the fieldhouse) and someone else at the school took his sister home. Both cats were very dehydrated, and the prognosis wasn't very good. He made it, but his sister didn't. When he was about nine months old, I noticed that he wasn't jumping up on things like Bones, my other cat. He also was slower to move around, and just didn't seem quite normal. I thought maybe he had suffered a little bit of brain damage due to the dehydration. But one day, I was playing with a string with him, and noticed that if you hung it in front of him and moved it around, he didn't follow it. But if you dragged it on the floor, he would pounce on it every time. It finally dawned on me that he couldn't see. He was taken to a specialist, but nothing could really be done.

Because I hadn't realized he was losing his sight, I had treated him the same as Bones. He has never considered this as a significant loss. He adapts to anything - new pets in the house, moving furniture around, new husband (although this change took a little more time for him to accept). He goes outside, in the back where he can't get out of the yard, and hunts bugs and runs after Bones and loves to chase balls. He has spatial sensibility of where everything is in our yard. He knows where every fenceline, tree, and any other obstacle is because of the map he's made in his brain, using his acute senses of smell, hearing and touch. He can run at top speed chasing a bug, leap in the air and catch it - and never run into anything. He knows where to hide behind trees so that I will not find him and bring him inside. He also has this gift inside the house, and has hidden in some pretty amazing places - causing me many panic attacks because I think he somehow got outside.

The vet told me that blind animals don't like to climb or go up to high places. Henry didn't get the "How to be Blind" guidebook, apparantly. We brought a new 6 foot tall scratch post, with little levels for the cats to sit on. By the second day, Henry was in the top bed. I put him on our mantle, which sits about 5 -1/2 feet up, to be in front of the window so he could listen to the birds. I intended to come back in a while and help him down, but he jumped down on his own while I wasn't looking. He got under the house once, and wouldn't come out because it was winter and all of the hibernating toads were under there to chase. When we've moved furniture around, the other cats hide under the bed. He explores and climbs all over everything, then remembers exactly where it is. He paces like a tiger when he can't go outside, and loves to sit in our laps, purring and slightly drooling, for hours.

Every day, he shows me his courage. Each moment he lives life to the fullest. He is fearless, and I wish I could be more like him.