Tuesday 30 December 2014

Blacky: The Miracle Baby ^_^.

Blacky: The Miracle Baby.
Hope is a powerful feeling which works like a double edged sword. It lets you hold on to the last strands of sanity during perilous times by placing you on the road to a miracle and when things don’t work out as planned, it makes you feel as if you’ve taken a fall off a cliff and plunged into the abyss. In this article; I’m going to take the reader to the heart of a miracle by narrating the story of my eight month old kitten that took a fall from the terrace of an eight story apartment building onto concrete ground with nothing in between to break her fall and yet through an incredible stroke of miraculous luck; she survived the ordeal! 

                                                    Kiara.                                                                             
Serendipity is central to my story underlying a train of disasters that was soon to ensue the calamitous state of affairs I was to find myself in. It all started one evening when I found a cadaverous little kitten, all dressed in black with fiery iridescent eyes on the staircase of my fire exit. The kitten looked scraggy, emaciated and famished and so out of the goodness of my heart I took her in and nourished her back to health. It was not long before my entire family fell in love with her and decided to raise her as our own and with matrilineal superiority raining down our throats decided to name her ‘Blacky’. At this juncture it is imperative that I mention that I have another cat called Kiara; which is a cross betwixt a Turkish-van cat and a Burmese cat. Kiara is gargantuan when compared to other cats and at first she didn’t take too well to Blacky as she would at the slightest provocation hiss and smite at her. Impish Blacky, the boisterous of the two would never shy away from a confrontation and would do her best to curdle Kiara’s blood by pouncing on her from every nook and corner of the house. It was incidents like this that caused Kiara to become more prudent with her perambulations around the house and such playful banter broke Kiara’s self-effacing bulwark and pretty soon every morning the two would engage themselves in wrestling matches with the intent to out maneuver the other to the ground. After an interlude of two months the two seemed inseparable; as their lives became so entwined that they would eat, stare out the window, play and sleep together.
                                                             
Blacky & Kiara sleeping together.
 I’m sure one has heard of taking a dog for a walk but it would seem ludicrous when I tell people that I take my cats out for a walk. Every morning at the crack of dawn I would take Kiara and Blacky up to my terrace and let them play for about an hour when everyone was asleep. Kiara would spend time wallowing in the dust and Blacky would give wings to her wildest desires of chasing down pigeons. This became the order of the day and at times when I was lazy to wake up; the two girls would pester my mother to open the door and her acquiescent nature would always cater to the need of the girls.

 Kiara & Blacky: Two sides of the same coin.
On the 23rd of November which happened to fall on Diwali I was a bit perturbed about sending the girls to the terrace and after a horrifying spasm of meowing I decided to let them go. I played with them on the terrace for about half an hour after which I decided to retire to my room and spend my time more judiciously by firing up my laptop and ironing out a wrinkle on the internet. After an intervening period of twenty minutes Kiara came back from the terrace and by the look on her face I knew she was trying to tell me something. She looked agitated and going by the tenor of her purr I knew she was telling me that something on the terrace had gone horribly wrong. I immediately ran up the stairs…

It took me ten minutes to search every nook and corner of the terrace and I found no trace of Blacky. I knew she had a thing for pigeons as she caught one couple of days ago on the staircase. I decided to reconnaissance the terrace including the staircases that led to other buildings and she was nowhere to be found. There was one last location to look and that was down a vent which was open from the top with a semi broken wooden plank and from there on it was a free-fall down eight stories with nothing to break ones fall. My heart was pounding when I approached the vent. It was blacky’s favorite location from which she observed the pigeons. I approached the vent with a throbbing heartbeat and looked all the way down. One cannot stem the flood of emotions that ran through my spine and brought me to my knees when I saw blacky lying down in a state of stupor. My worst trepidations have finally come true. 

The nine story high vent through which Blacky fell.
Blacky had fallen from the 9th floor onto solid concrete with nothing in the middle to break her fall. I was aghast as words seemed to echo in a void and I was trying to get myself to call out to her. Ten seconds later I managed to utter the words ‘Blacky’ and in an instant she called back. I was unsure if I actually heard her reply or it was just my mind playing tricks on an emotionally over-whelmed soul and so I called out to her yet again and instantly came the lightning fast reply. I knew she was alive and barely holding onto life by a miraculous shoestring of a chance. She had severe internal bleeding which I could make out with every call. I knew it was only a matter of time before she drowned in her own blood and this is where my emotions got the best of me and I was on a collision course with a train of disasters. I was unable to maintain my equanimity in such a situation and my inability to temper patience almost cost Blacky her life. Firstly I knew not the location to which the vent opened up to and secondly I had to find the liftman to pinpoint Blacky’s location. I ran down the stairs and brought the liftman up to show me the location. Then after a brief stint at guessing her location the two of us ran down to get Blacky. I knew I was losing out on crucial time. I found Blacky on the ground and she recognized me instantly. I picked her up with my hands and ran home to a surprised mother who began to breakdown as soon as she saw Blacky.  Without taking our phones and wallets, my mother and I sat in the car and drove to a nearby veterinary hospital. My father told us that he will finish locking up the house and will meet us at the hospital. The situation was deteriorating as Blacky was now sprouting blood from both her orifices (mouth and anus). The white shirt that I was wearing at that time was drenched in blood and that only added to the chaos and bedlam within the car. Upon reaching the hospital the security guard came up to us and told us that the hospital was closed on account of Diwali celebrations and that the doctor had just left the premises a few minutes prior to our arrival. And so we went back home to see if father was still there; all the time losing out on precious time to save her life.

                                                        Blacky: First day after the fall.                                                                          
When we reached home we found it locked. We had no phone and money and so my mother went to our neighbors’ house and requested them for the use of their phone. She spent ten minutes trying to get my father on the line and to no avail as the call wasn’t getting through. With every passing second I knew Blacky’s chances of surviving was slipping away. There was another veterinary clinic about twenty minutes from our house and none of us knew the way. With no phones and wallets in hand we knew it was going to be a stab in the dark as we had to take the gamble with directions to give Blacky a fighting chance and so we plunged heedlessly into the twenty minute drive and all this while Blacky was throwing up blood. She was on the verge of dying and now she began to slip in and out of consciousness. 

Our frustration peaked with every misguided direction and with Blacky struggling to hold onto life I allowed frustration to slip sense from tongue and began to hurl tirades of abuses at every wrong turn. I then looked up at the firmament with hopes of receiving some sort of recourse and my prayers were soon answered when we reached the hospital. I passed my father by the waiting room as I rushed Blacky into the emergency ward. Blacky was immediately put on IV drips and the doctors injected her with several coagulants. I don’t know how long Blacky was lying on the concrete floor after her fall and the amount of time that we lost in getting her to the hospital; but the momentousness of the occasion was lost in the welter of a thousand mistakes and just as Blacky slipped in and out of life, a variety of anxious thoughts ran through my head. Way to follow a train of thoughts I said to myself. The situation abounds in ironies as every decision of mine was wrong right from the start. Firstly I should have gone with my gut instincts and not have allowed Blacky to go to the terrace. Secondly while rushing her to the hospital I should have taken twenty seconds out to grab my phone, had I done that I could have called various hospitals to see which one was open and rushed Blacky to one well within 10 minutes but instead I chose to let her languish on the verge of death by gambling between two hospitals and my house for a good part of an entire hour before getting her to the vet. I was now in the emergency room holding Blacky down while the doc made a careful vet of her situation. My mind was now a devil’s playground.

I was trying to figure out how Blacky managed to fall from such a height and yet survive for so long? For over a month Blacky was prancing on the terrace without ever so much as taking a minor fall and today she plummeted down nine stories? She must have been instinctively observing the pigeons as some acts cannot be avoided when stripped of choice and with the help of some divine interpolation it hit me. It was Diwali! While she must have been sitting comfortably on the edge of the vent; a cracker must have startled her off the ledge and onto concrete ground. The screams within me rose to earsplitting intensity as I had to watch the life drain out of this eight month old kitten. It was by no stretch of imagination that an innocent creature should deserve such a comeuppance. By now Blacky started convulsing violently and I told myself it was only a matter of time before the inevitable end would claim her life.
The doctor’s tone invited no discussion and I couldn’t get myself to look at Blacky in such a dismal state. Equally disheartening was looking out the emergency door at my parents who were worried out of their wits. I looked at the doctor and his orderlies that were holding onto Blacky’s convulsing body as despair was painted on everyone’s countenance and the doctor sketched a melancholy picture with his carefully chosen words. “Chances are feeble”! It was gut-wrenching to hear those words fall from his mouth but I knew he was talking out of experience. In ghostly outline, I saw the beginnings of the end.
                                                 
Blacky’s story is a tale of caution. In the kaleidoscope of shifting conditions what dose of a dangerous environment can be safe except one where people go out of the way to ensure that all construction work is complete and out of bounds to passersby. What if Blacky’s fall was replaced by a Child who fell while playing on the terrace? Such vents should be sealed off with perforated lids but as the saying goes, it is human to err! Humans with all their supposed superior ingenuity cannot foresee and forestall. They can only swing into action after a tragedy has ensued!

After about an hour there was a tantalizing glimpse as life began to seep into Blacky as she lifted her head to look at me. In the lightning flashes that followed the thunder of discontent I was amazed at Blacky’s resoluteness to live. She now began to shudder and kick about violently as it took two orderlies and the doctor to hold her down. She was soon dowsed with a muscle relaxant. The amount of strength she could muster immediately after such a fall was baffling! The doctor seemed bamboozled by her resilient nature and asked me if she really fell from the terrace. Such a fall would have instantly killed a human but here was an eight month old kitten that managed to pep death by the smallest of margins and pull off a miraculous escape. Eight hundred rupees read the bill of fare presented to us by the doctor. Emotions ran high when I looked at the figure. At present times what goods of value can one really purchase with eight hundred rupees? To us; the amount did no justice to what we were about to get in return. We bought Blacky extra time to live out and no amount in the world could match her price. The doctor later disclosed to us that the clinic was actually closed for the day and that he had arrived just to perform a prayer on this auspicious day and was planning to leave in the next fifteen minutes had we not arrived. We thanked him profusely for his services.

We took Blacky home after her IV drip came to an end. The doctor warned us that she has suffered extensive internal bleeding and the extent of her internal injuries is yet unknown and that her condition was extremely critical and we should not have our hopes set on her recovery. I knew in my heart that Blacky was a fighter and if there was ever a chance for a kitten to survive a fall from the terrace of an eight story building onto concrete ground, then it was Blacky who could make that happen. That evening we placed Blacky on a mattress on the floor and kept checking on her. We kept an eye on her breathing pattern which was oscillating between a slow and quick rhythm. After an hour she disappeared under the bed and crawled all over the room, unable to restrict her movement we let her be and locked the door. When I was on my jog that evening my mother called me and asked if I placed Blacky on the bed before I went for my run. I would never have done that for fear of her falling off it and injuring herself even more. But there she was on the bed, fast asleep. We were all astonished as to how she got herself up there. We knew the fall definitely broke many bones in her body but were unsure of the number as we had no x-ray to confirm it. Breathing that evening was difficult for all of us as the air was polluted by smoke from the Diwali celebrations. Blacky thus contracted respiratory infection which developed into cold, cough and fever. Animals including humans with internal injuries perish due to infections they contract after surviving such an ordeal. Blacky was still bleeding internally and blood now began to enter her lungs. She was coughing relentlessly and the blocked nose from the cold didn’t make it any easier on her. We gave her a little bit of honey that stopped her cough and soon she was asleep. That evening my mother and I took shifts at sleeping as one of us had to constantly keep an eye on her. Because Blacky was kept in a room at the far corner of our house I kept her door ajar which enabled us to peek into the room without disturbing her sleep. By morning I was extremely fatigued and I inadvertently slipped into a deep sleep.

My mother was reduced to tears when she opened the door next morning as she found Blacky out of bed and right by the side of the door crying for one of us to come over and talk to her. So that day we decided to buy an open bed for her to lie in and placed it on my bed. That way she can be a part of our lives while we go about our daily activities. Love, care and attention were exigencies of the day and vital for her recovery. Taking care of Blacky was by no means a cinch as one of the family members had to stay by her side at all times; fastidiously serving her every need such as spoon feeding her, cleaning her, giving her medicine and carrying her to her toilet bowl. She is as much a family member as my mom, dad or Kiara and in my heart I knew for certain that Blacky will make a full recovery as long as she doesn’t slip into depression, hence we did all can to stay by her side and pamper her to the zenith!
                                                                    
Blacky's new open bed. 
There she was lying on a baby’s nappy pad comfortably ensconced in her new bed, looking out the window at the birds that flew by. In the midst of it all Kiara was feeling a bit left out and she began to dabble in what I like to call ‘ADS’ (attention drawing syndromes). Kiara would run all over the house, call out persistently in a fit of jealous rage to draw our attention away from Blacky. Kiara right from the start was recluse by nature and now started developing an affinity to spending time with my parents.

My parents and I scoured the internet, sifting through articles and blog posts hoping to find answers to ameliorate Blacky’s situation. While we found quite a bit of paraphernalia on how to handle the situation and what drugs to administer we never came across a case study to which we could relate Blacky’s situation. For four days Blacky refused to eat cat food and drink water and hence we were forced to take her to the vet to administer IV drips and various coagulant drugs as her bleeding was a recurring issue. She was inoculated with a high dosage of antibiotics to battle the infection and the doctor told us that the fever was not a good sign and portended the oncoming invasion of infections. That day we got her blood work done and the report showed a little bit of liver damage but imperatively showed that her vitals were fine. Since the liver is the only organ capable of regeneration, the doctor said that it wasn’t something that would neither give us sleepless nights nor cause her great distress. We were then asked to take her to a Pet Lab; the only one on this side of Delhi to get her X-ray done.

The people at the lab were cavalier to say the least and were going about their duty in an extremely nonchalant fashion. It just shows that only a bare beginning has been made in the way our society treats our animals. To quote Gandhi ji ''The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated"And judging by the way the lab conducts its business; there are several miles to go before we can consider ourselves a sanctimonious nation.

                                    Blacky's X-ray showing her broken pelvis and femur.                                                   
The X-rays were out and going by the horrified expression on the physicians face I knew there were somber times ahead. I looked at the X-ray, it showed multiple fractures on the Pelvis and her Femur. The Lab physician told me that her entire left femur was broken including her pelvis at multiple locations and that my doctor would advise the next course of action. So I took The X-rays back to the doc and the doc told us that there was nothing more he could do and if Blacky recovers from her infection, the bones will have to heal naturally. Looking at the X-ray I knew that natural healing without surgically reparation of the femur would maim her for the rest of her life and when I brought this to the doctor’s notice he told me that a surgery would be detrimental to her and we have to leave it to her ability to heal naturally. I knew I had to find another doctor as I had overstayed my welcome with the current one. And so the next day we took her to the hospital which was actually closed on the day Blacky had suffered the fall. The doctor looked at the reports and told us that the chances of Blacky surviving are very slim and to add to that she is not eating on her own. I was caught between a rock and a hard place when we began contemplating about taking the road to euthanasia. I felt a conflict between my blood and my brain as Blacky was too dear to lose and at the same time I didn’t want her to suffer. We spoke to many experts over the phone and everyone told us that her recovery is most likely out of the picture and we had to deal with the hard truth. We had to let her go!

It was a sobering fact to see Blacky eat on her own and pass her stools the next day. By some divine touch she seemed to have been invigorated and was now brimming with life. We immediately got down to pampering her and feeding her with her favorite food, freshly chopped blood soaked mutton liver. She gorged on fifteen pieces and went back to sleep. We took her to the hospital again and another doctor examined her x-rays and recommended that we speak to the surgeon and request him to perform a surgery on her femur at the earliest. We met the Surgeon and got his approval for the surgery scheduled for the very next day. He gave us a piece of iron rod and asked us to buy one with a similar dimension. I looked everywhere and found that only one lady within my locality was selling it for Rs. 1500 apiece. She had not the rod on her but promised to arrange it by the evening. While buying medicines for Blacky I asked the owner of the pharmacy if I could get a piece of rod elsewhere and he duly gave me the address of the shop and the rod of the same shape, size and material was priced at only Rs. 100. It just goes to show the lengths people are willing to go without qualms of moral conscience to make extra money. Now I had the rod with me and while showing it to the doc, an orderly barged into the room and informed the doctor that the next day was declared a holiday by the government and that Blacky’s surgery was postponed by a day.

On closer examination of the X-ray and my diligent observation of Blacky’s sitting posture revealed contrasting results. Blacky was Lying comfortably on her left femur and pelvis while the X-ray showed that those were the bones that were completely broken. Either the X-ray was wrong or Blacky was going against the laws of pain. Even while standing Blacky pivoted on her left leg instead of the right one. I was skeptical of the X-ray and two days later just before the surgery was to take place I asked the doc to carefully examine the leg that was broken. After a thorough examination of both her hind legs, my hunch was proved right. Her right pelvis and femur were broken contrary to the criminally inaccurate X-ray which revealed the opposite.

                                                   Blacky's X-ray after the surgery.                                                                 
A new and different hand was on the tiller as the doctor successfully operated on Blacky. The X-ray machine at the hospital was not in a functioning state and we rushed Blacky immediately after the surgery in her anesthetized state back to the pet lab that made the horrendous error with her earlier X-ray, to take yet another X-ray to ensure if the rod had been inserted properly. Standing by the reception counter was an infuriated version of myself because of their prior error with her X-ray but I was compelled to perform a delicate balancing act by both condemning and condoling their procedures as I knew I had no other option but return to them for yet another X-ray after a months’ time before getting her rod removed.

                           Blacky's new cage to restrict her movement after the surgery.                                    
A new complication arose when Blacky started passing blood along with her urine. We were alarmed and we immediately took a sample of her urine back to the pet lab to have it examined. When the reports came in, we were thrilled to know that she hadn’t contracted any infection and that her kidneys were functioning rather remarkably well. On the question of blood in her urine, we were yet dumbfounded. We later attributed the blood flow to the trauma that she suffered from her fall.

Cats are extremely clean creatures. Despite her broken bones Blacky refuses to come out of her toilet bowl without covering her stools with mud.
There are tantalizing glimpses on the 8th of November that suggested that Blacky was on the course to a full recovery as she ate and drank on her own. I would like to share a small message from my family to all those who have pets and are in the midst of experiencing a similar situation as we have: We would request you to turn thoughts from unfortunate past as we must look towards better days to come. Such memories will fade with time as do all that are born out of misfortune. During the vortex of such struggles, especially when one is reacting to constantly changing circumstances, we must remember that one rarely is in the right frame of mind to consider carefully all the ramifications of one’s decisions and we are here to do the best we can with what little we know. The key to saving your loved one from the clutches of death is love, comfort and constant attention. These along with medical treatment can help lift your loved one from a dismal state to one filled with exuberance and elan.
                                             
          The Xray was taken a week before the rod was surgically removed.                           
Blacky underwent a minor surgery to have the rod that was lodged within her femur and pelvis removed on the 28th of November. Since then she has recovered remarkably well as she is running on all fours without ever so much as a minor limp.

 It was not long before the naughty devil got back to her normal life filled with shenanigans and attempts at pestering Kiara to her wits end!
The story has finally run the course of its life and we are more than pleased to see it culminate with a happy ending. Blacky, the lucky baby that found herself a home within our family and dodged the clutches of death to become one among the elite group of immortals to have survived a fall from grace and into our hands as a reincarnated miracle baby that survived the odds!