I've been a slacker for far too long. After such a promising month of posting in November and fairly regular posting in December, even with the busyness of Christmas, I've totally lost it since then. But I have a piece of scratch paper with a few topics and other things bouncing around in my head, and I'm determined to start blogging more regularly. It's not that I never have things to write about, either. It's just that I get busy with other things, then forget to blog when I do have spare time, instead wasting a bunch of time reading articles and catching up with people on Facebook. There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but I do want to write more often and need to be reminded of that when I have time on my hands. So here's my first day of getting back on track. Warning: It's a long one.
Yesterday we had to put down our cat, Carol. She was about 13, which doesn't seem that old to us because our two previous cats were about 17 and 16 when they died. The eldest, Tinsel, definitely showed signs of aging for a while before she started to really go downhill, so hers was the one we anticipated the most, although it was still difficult. She had hyperthyroidism when we found her while out on a walk near our apartment. She was skin and bones and had knotted hair all over her body. We took her home intending to find her a place with other people, but couldn't for some reason find anyone who was interested in a geriatric cat who needed medication twice a day. So we added her to our other two cats, Carol and Morticia, neither of whom was happy about having to share us with yet another cat, having already adjusted to living around one another when we got married.
Tinsel did fine for about 4 years after that. Then we moved to Washington, and she started having other health problems. In the six months from the time we moved here until the time of her death, she ended up on 7 medications. If we'd been with another vet, they might have said sooner "It's time to let her go," but the vet we were going to sometimes seemed to err on the side of overtreating and prolonging life. Even so, she started to have trouble moving around and her eating drastically tapered off. Then one morning, I found her asleep in the litter box, where she'd gotten in and couldn't get back out. One eye was really dilated, which we discovered was a sign of having a stroke. We got her out and watched her and held her, and she didn't make any attempts to move around. We knew it was time to say goodbye, so we took her to the vet, and they gave her an injection as we sat with her.
That was the toughest time I've had losing a cat. I think it's because it was the first time I ever had to really live through the death of a pet. Previous pets in my family had been given away or were outdoor cats that had gone off to die on their own, except for our family dog, who my dad had to put down due to cancer while I was off at college. I didn't find out about his death until months afterward and only saw him occasionally at that point, so while it was sad, it wasn't raw grief.
That was in September 2006. In April 2008, 3 or 4 weeks before I was due with Ben, our cat Morticia started to have really bad breath. I looked in her mouth and could see that her gums looked swollen and bloody, so I thought she needed dental surgery. I took her to a different vet and they examined her and did some blood tests. They said that the teeth might be the only problem or they might be a secondary symptom of something more major.
They called the next day, a Friday, to tell me that Morticia had catastrophic liver failure. There wasn't much they could do for her other than something risky and expensive like a liver transplant, which they didn't recommend for a cat of her age. The vet said that the kindest thing would be to euthanize her. Because they didn't do euthanizations on the weekend, it meant I needed to bring her in before the end of the day, or make her suffer through the weekend so that we could have more time with her before we said goodbye. I hated having to act so quickly, but I knew she couldn't be feeling good with major organ failure. So at the end of the day, I met James at the vet (Rachel said goodbye to Morticia at home and then stayed with my mom), and we had her put down.
I cried more with Tinsel than with Morticia, and I felt guilty about that because Morticia was "my" cat. She belonged to my roommate when I moved in with her in 1994. When I moved out in 1996, she asked if I wanted to take Morticia because her other cat, Malcolm, bullied Morticia regularly. So Morticia became my cat. After we had to put down Tinsel, I felt guilty, even though I knew it was the right thing. But there was still a little part of me that thought "Was there even the tiniest other thing we could/should have done?" I knew that there wasn't, though. She was 17 years old and hadn't been in really good health for a long time. It was time to go.
Morticia came as a shock because I hadn't expected such dire news when I took her to the vet the day before. But since I'd dealt with the process before, it didn't strike me as hard. I was sad for a long time when I thought of her and am still a little sad thinking about the cats that we've lost. But I'm glad that we've had them in our lives and gotten to love and care for them, even though this part of it sucks.
And now that brings me to Carol. We said goodbye to Carol yesterday after receiving news from the vet that her failing kidneys had gotten much worse. There weren't many options, none of them guaranteed, and all just delaying the inevitable. We knew that Carol wasn't feeling good and thought that any of those options would be keeping her around for our own selfish desires. So we took her in and stayed with her while her life ended. She fought it a bit, which made me so sad for her, even though I knew her body was shutting down. I hope that our presence comforted her. Before we took her in, I sat with her in the family room. She didn't come out of her cat carrier, but I sat next to it and petted her. She leaned into the petting occasionally and gave a short-lived purr a couple of times, but that was it.
It seemed to hard to believe that she was gone afterward, but one look in her eyes showed that there was no longer any life in them. I don't know if we'll see her again one day in heaven, but I hope so. I don't know what God's "policy" is on animals in heaven, but I would be sorely disappointed to get there and find out that there aren't any animals. And I don't know if we'll see specific animals, but it would be wonderful if we do.
And now because this ended up being much longer than I originally intended, the cookies will be in the next post. But believe me, they're worth the wait.
