My cat, Sammy, died on Monday afternoon. He was only seven years old. His health deteriorated rapidly after what seemed to be, at first, a routine feline cold-my other cat got it and she recovered fairly quickly. But then he started to sound more and more like he had a huge hairball stuck in his gut, because he would wheeze and cough so loudly, but nothing would come out. Then he started to throw up, and soon after I noticed he was jaundiced-his eye membranes, gums, and skin was yellow. I googled this condition and suspected that he had serious liver problems. Deeply concerned, we called the vet to make an appointment for him.
After this first appointment was over with and his blood tests came back (liver enzymes were elevated), his second appointment for an ultrasound came almost a week later. They found a tumor that looked like it was on or near the bile duct, about a centimenter in diameter, which must be huge for a cat. I felt like fainting, and I'm sure my mom and dad didn't feel too good either, after we heard the grim tone of our vet's voice. They said they couldn't be sure what it was, if it was cancerous or benign, until they opened him up in surgery.
Unfortunately, there seemed to be very few surgeons that had the specialist know-how to operate on him on our island (we live in Hawaii), and the surgeon that my vet had the closest connections with was on another island and wouldn't be back until April 7th. We felt that we couldn't wait that long, and went with another surgeon that the vet had reccommended. His surgery was scheduled on Monday.
In the thirteen days before this surgery happened, I was force-feeding him because our regular vet told us the most I could do for him right now is to make sure he was fed. Because soon after I noticed the jaundice, his appetite stopped. She demonstrated to me how to force-feed him, and it was very easy to get the hang of after the first couple of tries because he was such a peaceful, laid-back cat. He never tried to swipe at me or bite me, and the most he ever did was run away from me, especially in the last few days. I even felt bad that I was feeding him in the last few days, even though I knew it was necessary, because he looked at me like I was trying to hurt him and that made me feel hurt in turn. I kept a log in my notebook and in the first week and a half, I was feeding him every three to four hours. In the last few days I didn't feed him as much, because he was starting to throw up and he wasn't digesting the food even hours after I had given it to him. He has a history of constipation, but this condition threw it completely out of whack, and I started to suspect that he might be entirely blocked up and unable to eliminate. So we asked our vet and she told us to get him squash or plain pumpkin baby food as a laxative. But still nothing seemed to happen. He was a huge cat, slow and strong and powerful, white with black spots, and to see him waste away before our eyes was really painful. I used to give him playful shoves like you would with a dog and he wouldn't budge, but now, even the slightest touch seemed to topple him.
And then, on the night before the surgery and the next morning, he seemed more active than he had been in weeks. He stopped sleeping so much and came out on the night before to interact with my mom and dad, swishing his tail against my mom's leg and my dad's face. Before, Sam had had something resembling a playful adversarial relationship with my mom, but I think he was trying to make amends with her and she did with him. The morning before he seemed like he was asking for treats for the first time in days and I felt so guilty because we weren't supposed to give him food before the surgery. Besides feeding him, I also spent a lot of time with him, just lying down with him and petting/scratching him and telling him that I loved him. On the outside one would say he has a stoic personality, but I knew he felt things deeply inside. A few times when we were alone together he would put his paw on my hand or ankle and look directly into my eyes and knead that one paw gently, gripping my hand as if to say "I know you're trying to help me, don't worry, I know you're doing your best." Or he would lay his head on my leg. When I was scratching him he would purr often to let me know he was contented.
When we put him in the carrier the morning of the surgery, we were all terrified, including him. I have had anxiety problems in the past and so while my dad drove, I sat in the back with Sam shaking like a leaf in a hurricane. But I was not going to let my fear get the best of me that day, so I held it down enough to try to comfort him. We dropped him off and my dad and I said our goodbyes to him, and left. We were awaiting the surgeon's call in the afternoon, hoping for him to call before he performed the surgery. The surgeon that was going to operate on him is a very nice guy and I got the impression from our consultation that he genuinely cared about Sammy and making him well. He let us know in advance that if he found that it was indeed cancer and it had metastasized, he would scrub off and call us during surgery to let us know about our options from there.
The dreaded call came, and as I saw my dad come up the stairs and the look on his face I knew what his prognosis was. I couldn't bear to stand anymore and sunk onto the top stair. He gave the phone to me and the doctor told me that it did look quite bad and that it was an aggressive cancer and that it had metastasized. It had already spread from his bile duct over to his liver. He could connect his gallbladder directly to his stomach and that would buy him about two to four months to live, but he would suffer lots of pain post op for the next few days and after that his condition would be much the same as when I was feeding him and he would slowly deteriorate and suffer a slow end. I could opt for that procedure or I could opt to put him down. When I heard those words my mind blanked out and I just started crying, I felt outside of myself, and the surgeon was quiet on the other end but I could tell he was crying too from his sniffling when he was talking to me. In all the weeks I had worried about Sam and thought the worst would happen, it somehow never crossed my mind that I would have to decide to put him down. I didn't have long to decide, the surgeon gave my dad and I a few minutes to talk about it and hung up, and my dad said that I should ask him if there's any chance Sammy could live. If so, then we could consider putting him through the surgery, but ultimately it was up to me and he said he would support whatever decision I would make. The surgeon called back and I asked him and he said that he didn't have a chance to get better, and chemotherapy was not an option as it would only make him more ill--he had had this cancer for a while already and it was pretty advanced. So I finally told him to put him down.
I only had five to ten minutes to decide whether to end Sammy's life. I couldn't see any other way. I don't know why all the mundane, pointless decisions I had to make in my 22 years of life allowed me all the time in the world to choose, but this one decision, literally life or death, forced me to come to some kind of conclusion in just minutes. I am an indecisive person, but here I was mouthing the words I didn't want to say. Everyone told me I made the right decision-the surgeon told me that if it were his cat, he wouldn't want it to suffer. My dad finished the phone call and gave final permission for euthanasia, and then told me that it would have been selfish had I chosen the other route. That I was doing the right thing by ending his pain. But the horrible thing was that I was thinking of Sammy's well-being and suffering as some sort of distant thing-I was thinking more of, selfishly, how I would have to feed him and feed him and watch him slowly wither away and run from me while feeding him, only for him to die anyway, causing Sammy, everyone in my family, and me more pain. I keep telling myself that I tried my best, I did all I could, and I believed it, but at the same time, at the back of my mind, I felt like I should have taken him to the vet a long time ago, a year ago, just for a check up, maybe they would have found something then. But then I think to myself that he seemed perfectly healthy and fit until I noticed he was jaundiced, so how would I know he was ill?
Everything about that day was off, even down to the littlest things-it was going to be a full moon that night, the power had went off due to a pole going down right in our area (going on, conveniently, just when we were talking to the surgeon), our schedules were disrupted and people were not where they should have been. We called my mom at work and told her about Sammy right after we got off the phone with the surgeon, and she was home in the afternoon. My grandma works close by to my mom and, due to a misunderstanding between my mom, dad, and I, my mom had picked up my grandma from work and had just arrived at home while my dad and I, thinking grandma was still at work, went to pick her up. After that whole debacle my mom, dad, and I set off together to get Sammy's body, to take him home and say goodbye one last time before we buried him in our backyard. As I said before I did have some anxiety problems and panic attacks, but for the rest of that day there was no room for fear. I felt numb. I paid for the charges at the vet up front and carried the box myself and refused to put it in the trunk, but instead, beside me in the backseat.
I got to say goodbye and while my dad had spent the whole afternoon digging the hole (our soil has too many rocks and deep koa tree roots), I was the one who buried him for the most part. We buried him with his water dish, which was his only true possession, because that was the only thing he felt he needed to guard from the other pets in the house. He wasn't much interested in any toys I tried to give him. He would always lie with his arm slung casually over the edge of his blue bowl, like a guy waiting at a bar for his beer and a chance to pick up chicks. But in the last few weeks he spent more time at the bowl, then none at all, opting instead to drink running water from inside the bathroom and spending most of the time not drinking, but simply sitting down, looking up at the trickle of water in a wonderous, innocent, spiritual way, the way a child looks at a Christmas tree for the first time. But I will always remember him as he was, though, with his arm slung over that bowl, with that calm, confident look on his face.
He would always stomp around my head in the morning to wake me up and meow in my ear and at night, collapse on my feet when I was in the bathroom because he knew I was just about to go to bed and wanted more food. He was also our furry smoke alarm, because the one time my mom's muffin's were burning in the oven he yowled so loud and frantically an air siren would have paled in comparison. My dad and I would always say he was a ninja, not because he was particularly stealthy but because he knew exactly what obscure, tiny places on the body to press and claw ever so gently in order for you to bolt upright out of a dead slumber in a cold sweat in order to feed him. And if that didn't work, he could brush his tail directly across your face or, in some cases, sit on it as a last resort.
He was my best bud out of all the animals in the house. I love the others dearly but he was my "mascot," so to speak. When my mom, dad, and I gathered to watch tv, Kitty (a female cat with similar appearance to Sammy) would snuggle in my mom's arms, and Freddie (a papillon/long-haired chihuahua mix) would curl up next to my dad and immediately flip on his back to be scratched. My mascot was always late to these sessions and I would always have to call him to come. We had a shared language, just between the two of us, because I could just meow in a certain way and he would call back and tell me that yes, he was coming, hold your horses I'll be there in a minute. It was difficult to make him angry. When Freddie first came into the house as a tiny puppy and pulled at his whiskers, he said and did nothing and patiently let this strange new specimen he was studying pull and tug at his whiskers, comically stretching his face. I could speak to him, ask him questions, and he knew what I was saying because he would react in such an intelligent and sensitive way. He would always look straight at me and meow after I asked him a question and prodded a little for him to answer, because sometimes I just asked him silly things that he knew that I already knew the answer to, such as "do you love me?".
It's so strange. I knew it wouldn't hit me until the day after, so I threw away all of his used feeding syringes and cups and hid whatever unopened cans or unused syringes in the cupboard so I wouldn't have to look at it. At some point I threw away his feeding log and hid the receipt for his surgery, at the top of which said "Euthanasia," in my folder. The next morning I woke up and immediately started crying, and told my mom that he really is gone and I miss him so much. I dreamt last night that he was all cured from his surgery and he was back to his strong, hulking self, but then I realized in my dream that this wasn't real and he started to throw up in my dream again. I feel like I'm going nuts, like he's still here and I expect him to be in certain places all over the house even though I know in my mind he's not here anymore. I can't concentrate and if I was scatterbrained before, I'm having trouble remembering little things I did throughout the day. I cried so much the day he died that another reason I wasn't anxious was that I was mostly distracted by intense physical pain-my sinuses have never been good to me and then in the evening my entire face hurt and now it feels like I'm catching a cold.
But I am very lucky to have a supportive family, who knew what a special cat he was and exactly how he was like, but at the same time I know they are suffering with their grief in different ways too so I try to act normal in order to not upset them more. I think they're doing the same thing for me. Will this eventually get less painful? I think I know the answer, but I want to hear it anyway.
Rest in Peace, Sammy. You are my boy and always will be and I know you know why I did what I had to do.