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- Jul 7, 2015
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{I posted most of this in another forum and a kind reader suggested I post here, too.}
It's been an overwhelming few days. After spending a total of 10 hours over 2 days at the ER vet, we had to make the heartbreaking decision to euthanize our beloved Hemingway, who wasn't even 10 years old. He stopped eating and drinking on Sunday and by Tuesday night, we had to put him down.
Xrays showed his kidneys were 1/3 the size they should be. They were extremely small and also full of kidney stones. Xrays also showed that he was severely constipated. (He was an indoor/outdoor cat and did not use a litterbox, so I had no idea he wasn't pooping).
Looking back through the notes I kept on previous vet visits, and the notes I would occasionally keep on his behavior, I see that this actually was not as sudden as it felt. Just two weeks ago he stopped eating and drinking and was lethargic. I was getting read to take him to the vet then, but then started eating again. The same thing happened in January, December, October, and August.
The vet said our next steps were to do an ultrasound and see if there was any other kind of blockage. If so, that would result in surgery, which would be in the thousands of dollars, and require him to remain indoors for weeks (he hated being locked inside and always got so depressed. The longest we ever managed to keep him in was a week. Also, we have no garage or spare room where we could put him to recover. So, anytime he had to stay inside, he howled all night, keeping us up and the baby up).
If there was no blockage, we could hospitalize him for a few days with IV fluids. She said it might perk him up and with a diet change, it might give him a few months or a year, but that the kidney disease would eventually take him. I had a long, talk with the very kind vet. My concern was that we were going to head down a rabbit hole of tests that would likely lead to painful, expensive treatments. Hemingway was very difficult to handle, especially when stressed or sick, and it would always take several vet techs to do anything to him. The vet said that it would be nearly impossible for me to administer sub-Q fluids at home by myself (my husband works long hours and I'm home alone with a toddler for 15 hours a day). Indeed, whenever my husband and I attempted in the past to give him pills or medications, it was a stressful nightmare for him and us. The vet pointed out that we also needed to consider the quality of life for my family. I appreciated that. When I was a child, I watched my mother go through the anxiety and stress and guilt of giving our cat injections and medications for nearly two years when he was diagnosed with kidney disease.
It breaks my heart that finances were a factor, but it's true. We'd already spent $500 on the first visit, and close to $2,000 on previous visits in the last 6 months. As a middle-class family in an area of the country with one of the highest costs of living, continued expensive treatments weren't feasible for us.
I read something while waiting in the vet's office that said it's better to euthanize a day too soon than an hour too late. This gives me some comfort in the midst of my guilt. I do wish we had been able to take him home and have the euthanasia done there, but we couldn't get a vet to come out until almost 24 hours later. I didn't want him to suffer any more and I didn't want to subject him to any more stress from being handled by the techs.
I will second-guess our decision for the rest of my life. The very kind, compassionate vet said she thought it was the responsible, loving decision, so that gives me some comfort, too. She could have pressured me to continue with the expensive treatments, but she did not. I take the most comfort from knowing that we pampered him while we had him. He was my best friend during 2 years of painful, emotional in-vitro fertilization treatments. He brought us so much joy and I hope that he loved us, too.
If you'd like to hear more about the story of how we got him (we adopted him from a neighbor only 3 years ago) and what he meant to us, here's a link to a blog post I wrote about him 3 years ago.
I May Not Have a Human Baby, But I Have a Fur Baby! | Amateur Nester
(please note that some work and school firewalls may flag my blog as p*rn because it talks about my struggles with fertility and uses the clinically correct words to describe some reproductive processes... I can assure you there is nothing inappropriate there)
Thanks for reading about my beautiful boy. My sympathies to anyone else who is going through this.
