Fear of Needles

aichmophobia, belonephobia, or enetophobia

all terms that mean “fear of pins/needles.” And then there is the medical term that means a true phobia of needles (causing people who have this phobia to avoid like the devil any kind of medical treatment involving inoculations, injections, etc.) and that is trypanophobia. I was beginning to think that I was getting this because I would get extremely nervous before I had to pierce, with a beveled needle attached to a bag of saline solution, the little triangle of furry hide that you can pull up right over a cat’s shoulder blades. Mostly I was nervous because a few times I had done this to Frida and she spurted out from under my hands. It was extremely hard to do with just my two hands and without pretty much sitting on top of her. And then she would wriggle and squirm anyway and the short needle would pop out and squirt us both with a fine but insistent spray.

Well, I had to do it last night and this morning again because Miss Frida has taken a turn for the worse. The vet had told me before, maybe 6 months, maybe two years, but I hadn’t counted on two months.

I figured out if I first insert the needle, hold it steady, and then lay her gently on her side, the drip doesn’t seem as uncomfortable for her and she feels more at ease. Also, I need to slow the drip down a little– it was too fast before and it was freaking her out. My human mind is hopeful that plying these small discoveries will somehow improve her chances.

But, still, today, she hovers over her glass of water longingly, dips her mouth, but only succeeds in getting water up her nose, and then she totters a little, crying out in a high wail. She only sniffs at her food. She threw up this morning. She goes into the litter box and crouches, but nothing comes out. She’s going through all her motions of living, as if holding onto habits and rituals would get her up that ladder back to health. Funny, how I sometimes merely go through my habits and rituals and call that living.

Last night, I squirted some watered down cat food and more water into her mouth with a syringe. She resisted, of course, my fingers prying open her jaws, my crooked arm sandwiching her against my own body while the back part of her kicked and twisted like a fish dragged up into the air on a fishing line. That turned out to be a messy, smelly endeavor in the bathtub, and for all that effort, seemed paltry little nutrition and liquid for her rapidly deteriorating form. I can still hear her purr, very softly, when she is laying down to rest, which seems like all the time now. Her eyes don’t open very wide anymore, they are the shape of long, thin seeds.
The question is, do I take her back to the vet? It’s not even the money, at this point, although frankly the last vet bill did set me back quite seriously. It’s more that her condition is ultimately fatal (more so than just the condition of living in general, which ultimately, i suppose, is fatal) and they would just pump her full of liquids with an intravenous, give her antibiotics, and she’d be alone in a steel cage with other sick animals making a gray noise around her.

We’ll see, maybe she will recover now that i’ve figured out how to do this needle thing. I will do it twice a day, like prayers. I read to her yesterday, too, she seemed to like that. A sweeping love story told in language that some might find overwrought. I kept with it because there were passages where I put the book down and said aloud, “Damn, that is something good.” Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire. I read the ending pages this morning and felt, strangely, this: although the characters in the novel suffered greatly (in the way that sensitive souls suffer) during a great historical conflagration (WWII), their new lease on life (through love) at the end did little to console me. It was as if I admired the writing, but not its substance. The characters seemed just that– in a book, not representative of my life, or my future, or even my past. Perhaps this is a reaction to depictions of passionate love when one is not exactly in passionate love anymore. Rather, one is recalling it, and wondering about its aftermath. After a fire, there is some destruction, and eventually growth. If one is lucky enough to get older, the multitudinous facets of love do reveal themselves, and some of them not at all what you expected, backed like an old silver and glass mirror with the thinnest sheen of reflection–of Patience, Comprehension, and Will.