Most of you know that my husband was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer back in March. This year has been a scary and exhausting rollercoaster.
We have spent weeks at a time in the hospital, and I have been juggling appointments, caregiving, and trying to maintain some form of work in between. It has been a difficult task.
Although I feel like I have done a fairly good job of maintaining, it has still been an incredibly stressful time. Every day brings another, “I’ll figure it out.”
And I have. But I have never, in my adult life, relied more heavily on my family, friends, and community to help me through.
Unfortunately, my husband and I aren’t the only ones living through all of these changes. Our kitties have been here through every bit of it over the past seven months.
Brent has left for weeks at a time and come home a little different after every hospital stay. He has lost weight. He has had to rely on a wheelchair and a walker. The things he used to do without thinking now require help.
For Mojo, his world changed too.
His favorite hide-and-seek buddy can’t run around with him or pick him up anymore. The person who was part of his normal routine has been in and out of the house, sick, exhausted, and physically limited.
The only real routine we’ve been able to maintain lately is medication time.
I don’t think I realized just how much Mojo had been affected by all of this until this week, when I had to take him to the vet for symptoms that could have been life-threatening.
It turns out he has FIC (feline idiopathic cystitis), with a lot of crystals and blood in his bladder. One of the major factors that can contribute to FIC is stress.
And honestly, it made me feel so bad.
We talk so much about how stress affects our health—our sleep, our immune system, our mental and emotional well-being, our bodies.
But even when we feel like we’re handling things fairly well, the stress energy is still there. And it can affect the people—and the animals—around us, too.
Our lives have been anything but normal for the past seven months. We’ve been surviving, adapting, and figuring things out one day at a time.
But maybe this is a reminder that sometimes we have to stop and create a little normalcy wherever we can.
Routine matters. Rest matters. Play matters. Taking a break matters.
We can’t always remove the stressful things from our lives. Sometimes we simply have to find ways to give ourselves—and the ones who depend on us—a chance to breathe.
Apparently, Mojo needed that reminder for all of us.
