I just wanted to tell every single one of you something: I am astonished, gratified, comforted, and humbled that all of you would take a moment out of your lives to come onto a thread like this to help a fellow Freeper deal with the loss of a pet. It honestly brings tears to my eyes.
My wife and I left the vet yesterday, and drove up to a overlook that looked out from Eastern to Western New England. It was a beautiful, sunny, warm day with a blue sky and feathery cirrus clouds. The New England foliage was at its peak. We took some folding chairs out of our car and sat there for an hour or so. We both thought that if there had to be a day for a person or an animal we loved to leave this world, it couldn't have been a more beautiful day. We held hands and thought of our friend who was gone.
There is something about a pet. They give us unconditional love in a way that humans sometimes have difficulty doing. It is a free love they give you, and as a reward, you get to return that love. You come home, and when you open the door, your pet is often there waiting for you. (If it is a dog, that is a near certainty!) A cat is often there too, but...sometimes you get in the door before you see them trot briskly around a corner to you, tail and ears up I the air, their pleasure at greeting you is unmistakeable.
Sometimes you have to call out their name as you enter the house, and they respond by greeting you with a wonderful look, sometimes a vocalization, and they are happy to see you. If you have had a difficult day, that little encounter is often enough to take the edge off.
If you are lucky enough to have time to relax, your pet will often join you. My guy would circle around me looking at me, until I pat my lap and he would jump up and lay crosswise in my lap, his muzzle pointed straight up, eyes closed with pleasure, and all I would have to do is scratch his ears or chin to make him purr like mad.
If I got up at night, he was often sitting in the doorway watching me. He was an indoor cat, but any time the outside temperature was above 50 degrees, I would make sure all the bedroom windows were open, and while I slept, he would be sitting in one window or another looking at all the night life that exists outside the sight of us humans. I would wake, open my eyes, and see his silhouette in the window as he gazed out.
We love our animals, their habits and idiosyncrasies are as rich and varied as our own, and it is those little things that linger long after they have gone. I had one cat who fetched for me, plastic straws were his favorite. I had another who actually drooled when you gave his head a good rub. Odd things that made them stand out.
One of the most endearing oddities for me was stabbingly painful this morning in a way I completely did not expect, and in retrospect, it made me chuckle a little bit after the fact.
We cat owners know that one of the things cats enjoy is getting at head level with you. They like it when they can be eye to eye with you. I have chronic back problems, and a while ago purchased an inversion table which can really help out. So, I have this inversion table in my garage, I strap into it and flip upside down to stretch my back.
Comically (for me at least) my furry guy figured out that when I was inverted, I was a captive audience. It became a custom-when I went out to invert in the table, as soon as I was upside down the flap on the cat door to our garage would open, and he would briskly walk over to where I was helplessly suspended. Purring loudly, he would circle around and around my upside down head like some Shark of Love circling a bloody heart! From my inverted perspective, it was impossible to ignore him, so I took that ten minutes to give him rubs and scratches.
He occasionally came out the garage when I was out there doing things, but he seemed to know when I was getting on the table and would always come out...:)
This morning, when I inverted, there was something just terribly painful about not seeing that cat door flap open.
From reading all of your responses, I know for a fact all of you know exactly what I was feeling. Exactly. And I simply cannot tell all of you how comforting that was to me.
So we had to have him put to sleep. It was an awful decision.
I know there are people who think you shouldn't do that, and should let it play itself out, but my wife and I couldn't do it.
We had another cat (our first cat after we were married) who had kidney failure, and we were (on our own) injecting saline under the skin in his back to keep him going, but seeing him day by day get thinner, and thinner, his fur losing its beautiful gloss and his eyes sinking into his head as he became more and more listless. We forced pills down his throat until he couldn't fight back anymore. We realized one day with a startling awareness we were keeping him alive out of selfishness because we couldn't let go of him, we loved him so much we couldn't let him go. We both work in medicine, and while neither of us would ever euthanize a human, we both feel the same about stopping certain measures on a fellow human we love, because we don't want to make them go through it just so we can spend a few more days with them.
In the case of our cat, we were both distraught, realizing that in front of our eyes, he had turned skeletal. He was spending all day on our bed on his blanket, not moving, simply staring at the wall. When my wife called to him, he struggled to his feet and gamely tried to walk to her, but he couldn't disengage his claws that had gotten caught in the blanket, and when he finally did with difficulty he could barely walk. My wife covered her face with her hands, and we both knew.
I made an appointment and took him to the vet for an examination and blood test on Friday. I fully thought we were going to have to put him to sleep that day, but we wanted to see what the vet had to say and if we did some blood tests, what that might show. We said no extreme measures, no ultrasounds or CAT scans or exploratory surgery, but if the blood tests showed hyperthyroidism we would treat that. If his kidneys were gone, the blood test would show that as well, and we were not going to put him through dialysis.
As it turned out, the tests showed normal kidney function and thyroid function, and his abdomen was showing signs of fluid (ascites) collection and the test showed indications of pancreatitis. She said we could treat the pancreatitis aggressively, but when cats get to that stage, recovery is doubtful, and we would have had to force pills into him, have stays in an animal hospital, but it seemed most likely he had a tumor and was not going to recover.
We couldn't do that. We didn't want our last time with him to be spent forcing pills into him or taking him back and forth to an animal hospital. He was suffering.
So we had him for one more day.
There was a book some years ago by Mitch Ablom "For One More Day". I thought of all the people in my life who died before I could spend that last "one more day" with them while they were still able to communicate. The book left an impression on me, and when we took our cat back home, I spend that night with him. I stroked him, and brushed him, and even though he was still able to purr, his purr had an unnatural quality to it that indicated pain more than pleasure. Those of you who are familiar with cats know this type of purr, and even a severely injured cat, if conscious, can purr like this.
It broke my heart, but I had that one more day, and I took advantage of it. I put his fur-covered shelf up near the window as the beautiful sun came in, where he loved to lay on sunny days, and my wife and I brushed him and talked to him in the way that non-animal lovers find completely useless and silly. He was able to see the birds in our back yard as the sun warmed him. When the time came, I put him on the ground near the cat carrier, and...he slowly, and without protest, walked into it on his own and lay on his familiar blanket as we closed the door.
He didn't meow in protest as we drove him to the vet.
When the time came, before they sedated him, I got face to face with him as he lay on his blanket that was his own, looked into his eyes, spoke lovingly to him, and brushed him with his brush he loved so much as the drug took effect and he peacefully left.
God. This is hard to write. I have tears streaming down my face.
But I do believe in God. And I do believe animals have souls, and God loves their innocent animal souls. So I know he is in a good place now.
God bless our pets because they are sometimes the closest thing we can get on this earth to unconditional love apart from our immediate families, and even then.
If one of my wife's carefully placed plant protectors couldn't prevent him from chewing on her plants, I doubt a Pearly Gate is going to keep him out if it isn't open for him just to stroll on in as if he owns the place!
Thank you to all of you for your kind thoughts, from the bottom of my aching heart...thank you. God bless all of you.