re: #70 austin_blue

We had a similar situation with our middle child last year and it sadly also ended in us sending him on his way to the Great Beyond.

His name was Smokey and we’d found him as a pitiful little thing on a trip back to my mother’s home town (ironically) to attend my aunt’s funeral. He had mites, a respiratory infection, and a ravenous hunger when we brought him home, but grew up to be a beautiful cat that we had for over 16 years. Well, last February we noticed he was looking visibly thinner despite eating almost constantly, so we had him taken to the vet. Due to COVID running rampant at the time, it ended up being the emergency pet hospital where my folks sat in the parking lot for hours waiting for news. The diagnosis was he’d developed hyperthyroidism and aside from radiation therapy, the only option was to feed pills down his throat for the rest of his life.

About the same time is when he started urinating and defecating on the floor in the downstairs bathroom, which we took to be a sign that he was having issues getting up the stairs due to being so weak and moved his box downstairs. And for the next couple weeks, we thought the docs were right and he’d gradually improve as the medication started getting his hormones back in balance. Except one night three weeks later, while I was trying to grab a nap before work, I get woke up to be told that my dad was getting ready to rush Smokey to the pet hospital ER because while I’d been sleeping he’d unleashed this loud yowl, then started panting heavily with a glassy look to his eyes.

The two of us took him over the ER and sat in the parking lot for over 30 minutes before we got the call: He’d suffered the feline equivalent of a coronary, the heart damage was severe enough that he had maybe a day or two left, and our options were to have him put down or feed him more pills until he passed away at home. We both agreed that we couldn’t watch him suffer any longer, so we let him go peacefully in a quiet exam room, purring as he fell into sleep for the last time. To this day, I still curse whichever vet assured my folks that it didn’t “look” like he had cancer after that first exam, because I had to watch my best friend suffer for weeks without any hope of recovery. The only thing worse than having no hope is false hope.

Damnit, who’s cutting onions in here?//