My Stacy kitty is probably dying. For the past year or so, she would occasionally have a really slow couple of days where she seemed to be going downhill, but after a while she came around and seemed a little better. Obviously, she’s slowed down a lot and isn’t quite the same kitty as she used to be, but this time just feels different. She had been refusing dry food (ate nothing for about 36 hours), so I switched her to canned with some calorie supplement on top of that, and I’m actually sticking a plate in her face 3-4 times a day to make sure she eats, but it’s never more than a couple of teaspoons at a time. She’s been working on the same can of food since Friday, if that tells you anything. She is still urinating, but hasn’t pooped in three days, so things obviously aren’t being processed correctly. It seems as though her hearing is going/gone, because she doesn’t wake up until I touch her now. Years ago, she was FAT – like 12 pounds, but now she looks like she’s a victim of starvation and probably doesn’t even weigh five pounds. Occasionally,she’ll stumble a bit just walking across the floor, like her legs are too weak to move correctly, but she did get outside and sit in the sun yesterday.
I’ve considered having bloodwork done to see just how bad things are, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. She’s always been a hard stick; in the past, previous vets have had to try all four legs plus both jugulars to get enough blood to test, and I don’t want to put her through that kind of stress at this point. I’m really coming to grips with the fact that this may be It for her. It’s about a month shy of her birthday, and part of me wants to see if she can make it that long, but the other part says that I shouldn’t make her suffer any longer.
The last time we had to put a cat down, it was under much different circumstances. Zoe was acutely ill and we had spent quite a bit of money on diagnostics with no real answers forthcoming. I was pregnant, my brother had been dead for less than a month, and we’d just gotten home from a cruise. We had exhausted our reasonable financial capabilities and just had to sort of throw in the towel. It was sudden and unexpected – with all of the upheaval around the house, we hadn’t noticed that her health was so bad until the day before. I was alone at the specialty clinic with her, sitting on the floor in the lobby, sobbing over the decision. I made my husband come up there so he could see her again, and we decided that she had to go. VERY traumatic for both of us. We felt really guilty for not seeing her symptoms beforehand, and it was the second unexpected death in a very short time frame for us.
With Stacy, we’re at least a little more prepared. We know she’s old, we know she has issues, we know she’s not long for this world. Now it’s just up to us to figure out if we’re going to let her go on her own, or just help her out a little bit one last time. Just not sure.
