The Cat Has Recovered From My Husband’s Brain Surgery. But Wait, There’s More.

A requested follow-up, with additional feline angst

Bandit, in his preferred bathroom sink, which is not mine; photo by author

“A good day is a good day. A bad day is a good story.” — Glennon Melton Doyle

According to the eloquent Ms. Doyle’s logic, by now Bandit should be bursting with good stories. But, being a cat, he refuses to tell tales.

As one of his staff, I am posting this particular story in response to concerned readers’ requests for an update on Bandit’s condition following my husband’s recent medical adventure, as documented in a previous post.

In short, the news is mixed. I am happy to report that my husband’s Deep Brain Stimulation surgery to counteract his essential tremor has been a complete success. Bandit’s rehabilitation, however, following the ordeal of having his preferred human offline for a couple of weeks, has been hampered by a new development.

Six weeks post-surgery, he (the cat) was doing perfectly well. But then, this happened:

Chloe in a rare moment of stillness; photo by author

Reader, I recognize that there is no excuse for our betrayal. What I can offer is merely an explanation.

On March 17, Recovered Husband and I made an impulse visit to our local Humane Society. We’d been dogless since the demise of our late, great Molly. While Bandit is in all respects a superlative feline, he’s, well, not a dog.

The outcome of our Humane Society St. Patrick’s Day visit, Chloe — eight months old at the time — is pictured above. At our introduction, young Chloe sat on my husband’s foot and gazed adoringly up at him for the nanosecond she wasn’t zooming around the enclosure, and he was hooked.

Admittedly, so was I, but I’m not above throwing Husband under the bus when it comes to offloading judgment. Especially from the cat, whose disapproval has real consequences.

Bandit plots "accidentally" toppling a 25-lb box of cat litter on a passerby (me); photo by author

In our defense, which I realize is futile, Bandit has previously lived in harmony with several dogs. We did our best to guide the Chloe-Bandit introduction as gradually and sensitively as we could, but our confidence in our ability to pull this off was possibly misplaced.

Gradual and sensitive, we discovered early on, are two concepts that are utterly foreign to Chloe. She’s more likely to learn German first.

This is because sometimes Husband swears in German. That’s a result of his having been raised by a mother with Wisconsin-German farm town roots and is not a side effect of his brain surgery.

Here is as good a place as any to mention the actual results of his DBS. They are quietly spectacular. Seven weeks post-surgery, his neurologist carefully adjusted his implanted device and activated it. And just like that, the essential tremor that had made it torturous to do things like write checks or fill out forms, and arduous to do other small, basic life activities from shaving to tooth flossing — stopped as suddenly as if someone had thrown a switch.

Which, in essence, they had. A switch that took brain surgery and a nearly two-month recovery to install, but still.

The man could be a long-range sniper now. Luckily, that’s not an aspiration of his. Instead, he has plunged into a long list of household repairs and improvements that were nearly impossible with unsteady hands.

He’s updated our aging outdoor irrigation systems, gold-leafed a large mirror frame, and hung said frame precisely where it needs to be on the dining room wall. He has tracked down the sources and appended handy labels to every single switch on the formerly mysterious fuse box in the garage. Every day, he finds a new task to undertake with his surgeon-grade digits.

It’s a win-win for both Husband and me. For the cat, not so much. He now has a puppy to tame, and it’s a full-time job.

Bandit giving Chloe his FAFO look (Chloe had to learn the hard way); photo by author

The canines with whom Bandit peaceably coexisted in the past were fully grown, with fairly regulated energy levels. Chloe, on the other hand, approaches every moment of her waking life like a human three-year-old who’s just mowed through an entire box of Sugar Crisps.

As annoying as he finds Chloe, Bandit doesn’t blame her. He gets that she’s still a puppy, and puts up with her overeager sniffing and hopeless play-bows, only hissing and delivering a swat to her snout when it’s necessary.

Bandit’s resentment at having this unasked-for assignment dumped on him is directed at us. Rightly so, and he employs eloquent methods to express it.

One fairly mild tactic is hijacking our bathroom sinks, as in the top photo. He is eerily precise in anticipating the exact moment we need to brush our teeth or wash our hands. When truly irked, he resorts to more extreme measures designed to get my husband’s attention.

I blush to reveal this, but in the interests of full disclosure:

Photo by Husband, who is working on setting healthy boundaries

Other favorite protest methods include shooting through the back door despite our vigilance — whereupon he waits for us to rescue him from the outdoors before any of it gets on him — and hiding on the top closet shelf, while we frantically search the rest of the house and blame each other for letting him escape outside again.

We fall for it every time.

And of course, there’s the time-honored feline emotional vomiting maneuver, best deployed just before my morning alarm goes off. Two mornings ago, I managed to be grateful that the slimy deposits he’d yakked up were on the tiled floor of the bathroom.

Until I set my bare foot down on what he’d done in the closet.

But who are we to criticize? Bandit has a lot to get off his chest besides his fur. Much of which winds up in the bathroom sink.

One thing, however, unites Bandit and Chloe, and therein lies hope for future household harmony. While reasonably fond of me, both of them regard my husband as The Chosen One, He Who Rubs Cat Ears Just Right, and Exalted Master of the Chuck-It.

Every morning, once I’ve fed and watered both animals, because what else am I good for, they gather at the baby gate we’ve installed (the cat’s not wrong; living with Chloe is a lot like having a demented toddler in the house). There they await the advent of their most favored human.

Bandit and Chloe at the heavenly gate; photo by author

For a few shining moments, the peaceable kingdom reigns on Earth.