Cat scratch fever and pneumonia

One of my favorite memories growing up was when I was in middle school, around the age of 11 or 12. My family had recently moved from Corpus Christi, Texas to my hometown of Weslaco (also in Texas) and all four of us were living with my aunt Lisa in her three-bedroom house. It had been a tumultuous year with my uncle (my mom’s little brother) having passed away that December–a troublesome month since my paternal grandmother had passed just before Christmas eve not two years prior (and years later my paternal grandfather would also pass that month). Add to that a family of four suddenly living with a single woman in her thirties and you have yourself a recipe for family tension; some of which I saw firsthand in the way of fights between my aunts and uncles, my parents, and the like. Hell, my parents almost got divorced then–to the point that they sat both me and my sister down to tell us they were splitting up and asked us who we wanted to live with. It was a fucked up situation to go through in the context of being an adolescent in a new school in a completely different city than the one I’d been living in from the age of four.

But this is not those stories; rather, this is about the fall of what I believe was 1992. My sister had grown up with acute asthma that rarely forced her to use an inhaler (usually in cold months when she’d have a slight wheeze). I don’t quite remember the progression of her illness, but at some point she’d gotten so sick that she ended up hospitalized and what had begun as a case of bronchitis had transformed into full-blown pneumonia. I remember not being very concerned because my sister was a pretty tough little girl who had had her fair share of injuries. Up to that point she had 1) been hit in the head with an aluminum baseball bat after stepping too close to my cousin as we played baseball; 2) cracked her head on the corner of a brick fireplace after I’d swung her around the living room and let her go just a bit too early; 3) broken her arm after jumping off of the Ford pickup truck that my dad had parked in our driveway (my mom still thinks it’s a miracle that CPS was never called on us). And now, here she was with pneumonia, but because of her history I thought she’d be out of the hospital in a day or two, tops. But that day turned into a week, with my parents and my aunt alternating visits to stay with her in the hospital. She’d been in there about 4 days when I finally visited and it was jarring seeing her with tubes in her nose and hoses coming out of her arms and at some point during her stay, she told my mom that she missed her cat, Corinna.

The year before, one of the stray neighborhood cats gave birth to a litter of kittens under the deck of my aunt’s house. There were two gray and black tabbies, a calico, and a black cat. When I reached to grab the newborn kittens, one of the tabbies hissed at me, at which point I named him “Ren”, after the surly chihuahua from “Ren & Stimpy”. The other tabby my sister claimed and named “Corinna” after one of her favorite movies “Corinna, Corinna” and my mom claimed the calico and named her “Corazon”. Both Ren and the black cat were given to cousins, leaving us with these two cats that we’d eventually move indoors with us and my aunt’s Schnauzer, “Benji”. A fucking zoo, in other words. 

Ana loved that fucking cat. This seven/eight year-old girl would grab her cat and cradle her like a newborn, singing the words “Corinna…she’s muh BAYYY-beh.” And this cat would just fucking take it–no fighting or freaking out like many other cats normally do. She would just lay limp while my sister would truck her around like a fucking ragdoll. And here she was, bedridden and asking to see her cat. My mom then decided to sneak the cat onto the hospital grounds so that we could let her see Corinna through the window, so the first step of “Operation Kitty-heist” involved me having to corral this cat and smuggle her into the car, then into the courtyard of the hospital and up to the window where my sister’s room was. I was not my sister, however, so when I went to grab this cat she clawed the everloving shit out of my stomach and chest as I ran and threw her into the car. Realizing the error of our approach, we grabbed a towel and wrapped her up in it for the rest of the journey, lest I lose my nipples in the process. We were finally able to run into the courtyard, knock on the window, and present Corinna to my sister, who was genuinely happy to see her cat after more than a week in the hospital. A day or two later, she was discharged from the hospital and put on a strict regimen of meds and rest. Unfortunately, this coincided with the arrival of Halloween and my sister has always been a spooky child who LOVED scary movies and dressing up, and she was under strict orders not to go outside since the cold air could wreak havoc on her lungs. I can’t remember who came up with the idea (probably my aunt Lisa or my mom), but in lieu of trick-or-treating, we had the idea of ordering a bunch of pizzas and renting  scary movies for a marathon night. So, that Halloween night, we went off to Blockbuster Video and Dominos, and came back with a stack of movies. I don’t exactly remember which movies we rented–likely there was Friday the 13th and perhaps some episodes of “Tales from the Crypt”, which was Ana’s favorite show. I do remember that it was one of the most fun, wholesome family nights I’d ever have.

I don’t know why, but I was thinking about that memory recently; I haven’t talked to my sister in over a year, as bullshit family drama tends to adversely affect your relationship. There’s a thick vein of unchecked and untreated mental illness coursing through our family and, along with a predisposition towards alcoholism and substance abuse problems, this means that this shit is bound to happen (especially when people get married and begin extending their families). These relationships are complicated and sometimes growing older means that that history you have between you can fade into the background of your day-to-day existence and, before you know it, things come to an ugly and disruptive head. But I’m at least lucky that I have memories like that where, even briefly, there was a palpable togetherness in the midst of a trying and difficult year.