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- Jun 4, 2018
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Hi. I'm new here as I found this site while trying to make sense of our cat's sudden, awful, traumatic death. We did not have a necropsy and now I really wish we would have. I so wish I could know what happened and why and whether it could have been prevented.
This past Thursday, about 5 a.m., I heard my cat Squeek coughing like he had a hairball. Maybe a half hour later, my husband and I heard a weird panting sound. At first we assumed it was our dog, who does that sometimes when he's excited about eating breakfast or going for a walk or wants attention. Then my husband said he thought it was our 22-year-old cat, Jazz, who's not doing super well as her kidneys aren't really functioning well and we're giving her sub-Q fluids. My husband got up to look and realized it was Squeek, our 9 and 1/2 year old orange cat who seemed perfectly healthy and had gotten a clean bill of health at his last vet appointment. He was overweight, but all his bloodwork was fine and he was very active and seemed healthy.
We turned on the lights, and he was lying on his side on the bathroom floor with his mouth wide open like he was panting. He was breathing, and it almost seemed like he was gagging or choking on something but we couldn't see anything in his mouth. There was some drool.
We scooped him into his carrier and rushed out the door to the emergency vet, which is only about five minutes away. We had first heard him panting, then heard him sort of flopping around and struggling in his carrier and then he was totally quiet. As soon as we got to the vet, they rushed him back and tried to revive him, but couldn't. My husband and I were devastated. We couldn't believe a seemingly healthy, full of personality cat could be just gone in minutes like that. It was so horrible to see him suffering and looking terrified and not be able to save him.
I asked my husband if we should get a necropsy, and he said no. I kind of didn't want to either because I hated the thought and I also worried it would show something that would make us feel worse (like he choked on something, or something else that seems preventable.)
I can't stop Googling about sudden cat deaths, and I wish I could go back in time and get the necropsy so we could know. I've come up with these possibilities:
-- Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that caused a blood clot (this seems most likely and would at least mean it wasn't our fault)
-- He choked on a hairball or something else and that caused his lungs to fill with fluid
-- Heartworms (he spent some time outside, mostly on the porch, and we never knew he should have been on heartworm preventive ... our vet never said anything about this ... it kills me that it could be this)
-- Urinary blockage (he had had UTIs in the past, and he peed outside the box sometimes ... I was out of town for a few days and returned a few days before he died ... when I got back I noticed there wasn't much of anything in the cat box, I assumed he was going outside or had gone in some other spot (our 22-year-old cat uses pee pads, and I've seen him use her pee pad sometimes) ... I only found out later my husband had also noticed there wasn't much in the box while I was out of town but hadn't mentioned it to me)
-- Poisoning (our friends had given us a silver pothos plant while I was out of town ... when I arrived back home, not realizing it was toxic to cats, I put it on a table that the cats couldn't reach without knocking it over ... before that while I was gone it sat in an area they could access ... I have no idea if he chewed on it or not ... but it would have to have been several days before this incident if he did.)
-- A blood clot for some random reason ... I worry it's because he was overweight.
-- A cat illness ... he had all his vaccs, but we have a few feral kitties we have started feeding in the past six months ... they have all been to vet and vaccinated, but who knows what they could have and maybe have given him. One of them comes inside sometimes and I worry the stress of this could have hurt Squeek or he could have caught something.
Anyway, I'm sort of torturing myself with all this. I feel so awful and guilty that this happened, and that we didn't see any signs in time to save him.
Squeek was a very special cat that my husband found on the side of the road when he was a tiny kitten. He almost died then, and we rushed him to an emergency vet who saved him (he was flea and worm ridden and his body had started to shut down.) He was a larger-than-life cat, always making us laugh and giving us crazy stories. Like, he disappeared on moving day when we moved to Georgia, and I ended up staying behind at our old house to look for him and even hired a pet detective ... it turned out he had been hiding in a nook in the basement while I was out trapping possums and raccoons in my cat traps I set in the neighborhood.
He was a total ham, and he loved my husband best. He would lurk around waiting for my husband to get in bed each night, then he'd hop up and settle in. I so wanted him to sleep by me, but he rarely would. Once a month or so, though, I'd wake up in the middle of the night to find his fuzzy warmth by my feet. That happened the night he died.
I miss him so much. He had such a huge presence, our house will never be the same without him. He even ruled over the dogs.
If anyone has any theories on what most likely could have killed him, I'd like to know. It would help me to at least hear what others think or if anyone else has experienced something similar. Thanks so much.
This past Thursday, about 5 a.m., I heard my cat Squeek coughing like he had a hairball. Maybe a half hour later, my husband and I heard a weird panting sound. At first we assumed it was our dog, who does that sometimes when he's excited about eating breakfast or going for a walk or wants attention. Then my husband said he thought it was our 22-year-old cat, Jazz, who's not doing super well as her kidneys aren't really functioning well and we're giving her sub-Q fluids. My husband got up to look and realized it was Squeek, our 9 and 1/2 year old orange cat who seemed perfectly healthy and had gotten a clean bill of health at his last vet appointment. He was overweight, but all his bloodwork was fine and he was very active and seemed healthy.
We turned on the lights, and he was lying on his side on the bathroom floor with his mouth wide open like he was panting. He was breathing, and it almost seemed like he was gagging or choking on something but we couldn't see anything in his mouth. There was some drool.
We scooped him into his carrier and rushed out the door to the emergency vet, which is only about five minutes away. We had first heard him panting, then heard him sort of flopping around and struggling in his carrier and then he was totally quiet. As soon as we got to the vet, they rushed him back and tried to revive him, but couldn't. My husband and I were devastated. We couldn't believe a seemingly healthy, full of personality cat could be just gone in minutes like that. It was so horrible to see him suffering and looking terrified and not be able to save him.
I asked my husband if we should get a necropsy, and he said no. I kind of didn't want to either because I hated the thought and I also worried it would show something that would make us feel worse (like he choked on something, or something else that seems preventable.)
I can't stop Googling about sudden cat deaths, and I wish I could go back in time and get the necropsy so we could know. I've come up with these possibilities:
-- Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that caused a blood clot (this seems most likely and would at least mean it wasn't our fault)
-- He choked on a hairball or something else and that caused his lungs to fill with fluid
-- Heartworms (he spent some time outside, mostly on the porch, and we never knew he should have been on heartworm preventive ... our vet never said anything about this ... it kills me that it could be this)
-- Urinary blockage (he had had UTIs in the past, and he peed outside the box sometimes ... I was out of town for a few days and returned a few days before he died ... when I got back I noticed there wasn't much of anything in the cat box, I assumed he was going outside or had gone in some other spot (our 22-year-old cat uses pee pads, and I've seen him use her pee pad sometimes) ... I only found out later my husband had also noticed there wasn't much in the box while I was out of town but hadn't mentioned it to me)
-- Poisoning (our friends had given us a silver pothos plant while I was out of town ... when I arrived back home, not realizing it was toxic to cats, I put it on a table that the cats couldn't reach without knocking it over ... before that while I was gone it sat in an area they could access ... I have no idea if he chewed on it or not ... but it would have to have been several days before this incident if he did.)
-- A blood clot for some random reason ... I worry it's because he was overweight.
-- A cat illness ... he had all his vaccs, but we have a few feral kitties we have started feeding in the past six months ... they have all been to vet and vaccinated, but who knows what they could have and maybe have given him. One of them comes inside sometimes and I worry the stress of this could have hurt Squeek or he could have caught something.
Anyway, I'm sort of torturing myself with all this. I feel so awful and guilty that this happened, and that we didn't see any signs in time to save him.
Squeek was a very special cat that my husband found on the side of the road when he was a tiny kitten. He almost died then, and we rushed him to an emergency vet who saved him (he was flea and worm ridden and his body had started to shut down.) He was a larger-than-life cat, always making us laugh and giving us crazy stories. Like, he disappeared on moving day when we moved to Georgia, and I ended up staying behind at our old house to look for him and even hired a pet detective ... it turned out he had been hiding in a nook in the basement while I was out trapping possums and raccoons in my cat traps I set in the neighborhood.
He was a total ham, and he loved my husband best. He would lurk around waiting for my husband to get in bed each night, then he'd hop up and settle in. I so wanted him to sleep by me, but he rarely would. Once a month or so, though, I'd wake up in the middle of the night to find his fuzzy warmth by my feet. That happened the night he died.
I miss him so much. He had such a huge presence, our house will never be the same without him. He even ruled over the dogs.
If anyone has any theories on what most likely could have killed him, I'd like to know. It would help me to at least hear what others think or if anyone else has experienced something similar. Thanks so much.