My Poor Kitty
July 31st, 2015 by PotatoWarning: this post is about sad stuff while I’m grieving, and writing it may just be more for me than you. Feel free to skip this one. Comments have been disabled.
My cat is downright ancient by feline standards, pushing eighteen and a half. Like many older cats, she has kidney failure, and we’ve known for a while now that her days are numbered. The past few weeks she’s had a rather poor trajectory, and it’s clear the end is going to come very soon.
So I’m left with a very hard decision on timing. She barely ate anything yesterday, and refused food this morning, along with other troubling signs like urinating on her cat bed and only having two tiny bowel movements this week.
With my dogs, there was absolutely no question about euthanasia — either as the right move or on the timing. They were in distress, and their health declined hour by hour, rather than day by day. Their deaths came quickly and suddenly, rather than at the end of a chronic illness, and euthanasia was an unquestionable mercy.
With my kitty it’s a much harder decision. She is on a path to basically starve to death, and that is not how I want her to go — I’m comfortable with a decision on euthanasia as an endpoint. But the timing is so hard.
She’s not in distress, she’s not yowling in pain… she’s just lying here in the sunshine, snoozing. But she hasn’t eaten more than a few mL of food in the past few days, and her energy is so low her awake time is measured in minutes, and if she does try to get up and walk she stumbles and falls. Her tummy groans, and she looks nauseous when she does eat, or falls asleep mid-chew. However, she could go on like that for another few days.
It’s hard to say for sure that an injection today is a more compassionate thing to do than one tomorrow, or waiting for some other end at home over the next few days.
I think it’s time. I’ve made our final appointment with the vet. But it’s hard to say goodbye to a dear friend and companion, and I wish I was more sure about this than “I think it’s the right move and the right time.” But waffling on the fine timing is not going to change the fact that I do have to say goodbye to my sweet fluffy baby sometime very soon.
Goodbye, old friend.