Only Oscar

Oscar is gone now. 

He was always a challenging individual, lots of problems most not easy to resolve and new ones cropping up at unexpected times. But somehow our relationship endured. He was easy to be around with a placid accommodating temperament even when he was sick. We had our good times and bad, but he always seemed to be willing to try.

And so was I, right up to the end.

I ask myself now “Was Oscar a success or failure” and does that kind of judgment really apply?  He was a small black cat with a compromised immune system from the time we met several years ago.

He challenged my medical and analytical skills, my ingenuity, risk taking and ability to balance what could be done with what should be done. He made me think far outside the box.

When a new problem or reaction to treatment cropped up, his owner Judy and I would look at each other and say “Only Oscar” but always with a smile. He kept me up one night devouring most of a long untouched textbook of internal medicine, manically looking for “the answer” I might have missed. I found some crumbs but nothing more.

Then one day when, yet again, I hoped we might have found the “solution”,  his quality of life deteriorated.  His amazingly devoted owner called me to say he couldn’t jump up and was hiding from everyone. We had “saved him” before, but this time we both knew he had had enough.

What made Oscar  so unique was that he seemed to represent something larger than a medical challenge – the realization that there are no simple answers in life, but in striving to find the small openings along the way we discover our full potential.