Take Two Skritches and Call Me in the Morning

Take Two Skritches and Call Me in the Morning

Did I ever tell you about the time a cat cured me of a headache?

And a nasty headache it was, too. It fastened on me as I was on my way home from work one evening about eleven years ago. It may have been a migraine; I don’t remember. What I do remember is that it was so severe that my hands shook. When I tried to take my temperature to see whether I might be coming down with something, I found that I couldn’t hold the thermometer properly. My hands were shaking so badly that I dropped it and it shattered on the floor.

After I cleaned up the mess (including checking to see whether there was any mercury left on the floor—there wasn’t), I went out to the drugstore a few blocks away to get some pain medication.

Next door to the drugstore was an apartment building with a broad stone post on either side of the stairs leading to the entrance. On one of those stone posts lay a beautiful Manx cat with calico markings taking the last of the sun. She looked friendly, so I approached her, holding out my hand for her to sniff. Hello, nice cat. May I pet you?

She sniffed my hand and marked it with the scent glands at her cheeks. Yes, please, I’d like that very much.

I petted her and skritched her head, then started to give her a feline massage in earnest. After losing myself for a few minutes in the warmth and softness of her fur and the sound of her purr, I came back to myself and realized right away that something was different.

My headache was gone.

“Good, sweet kitty, thank you so much. How did you do that?” I asked her.

She just purred.

It’s possible that my petting the cat worked on the same principle that energy healing does. The theory behind energy healing is not that it cures; it simply allows the one needing healing to reach a state in which his or her own body activates its own processes of healing and balancing—a kind of reset button, similar to the effect of sleep. It’s likely that as I interacted with this lovely Manx, I relaxed enough to enter that kind of state even briefly, hit the reset button and came back up without the headache.

Or that the gorgeous Ms. Manx has abilities that the rest of us can only wonder at.

Whatever the case, she’s still around. And I’ve never told the pharmacist that he has a serious competitor in the pain-killing department right next door.