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I've been on kind of an internet fast for a while now, so my apologies to all the people I owe comments to, and hopefully I'll get in gear throughout this week and get them all out to y'all. But for the moment, this is just to say:
I came home Saturday night and Mary was worried about our cat Thelma, who hadn't been interested in dinner and was seeming listless. We fussed a little, but it didn't seem like an emergency. When I got up Sunday morning, she still wouldn't eat -- and she wouldn't move, and she would barely lift her head, and she was making these miserable noises. Mary and I both bolted out of bed like crazy people; I put on a sweater that I was literally wearing inside out the entire rest of the day, and we were calling around trying to find a vet that would see Thelma on a Sunday.
Long story short, she was really, really sick -- some kind of liver failure, the vet said, although it would've required lots and lots of bloodwork and whatnot to figure out exactly what was wrong, and then hospitalization, etc. etc. They gave her an IV to put some fluids back in, but basically, it was a lost cause. From hearing at sometime around 10:30 on Saturday night that my cat wasn't feeling well, at one o'clock the next afternoon we were petting her little ears while the vet put her to sleep. It was just so fucking fast, you know? I've had cats all my life, and I know they don't live forever, but it was the incredible shock of the whole thing that made this one particularly hard to deal with.
Thelma was not quite eleven years old. She was a rescue cat, from a ditch back in Tipton, Georgia, and she was a little OCD and fairly shy around people, especially compared to her attention-whore of a sister, Louise. Over the four years I lived with her, she got tons braver around people, to where she would come out from under the bed when there were visitors in the house and even occasionally venture outside on the balcony. She was almost as much of a lap cat as the others by the time she died.
We buried her at a friend's house on Sunday afternoon, wrapped in a blanket with the toy mouse that she loved beyond all reason and would drag from one end of the house to the other, making her yowling hunting noise. She liked to be hidden; when we had a Christmas tree up, she loved to be under it and watch the world from her little sheltered spot, so I hope she'd be cool with having her remains there under the trees. The other two cats are a little freaked by her disappearance, and I wish I had some way of explaining to them, because no doubt it's scary for them. Seishirou still sits there when I feed them, waiting around for Thelma to come eat first like he always did, which sort of kills me.
I was pretty much leveled yesterday, and today I'm feeling quite a lot better, but it's still hard to realize how fast it all happened, and all those things we did with her over the last week that were the last time and we didn't realize it. I wish she hadn't had to be in so much pain right there at the end, and though a part of me wishes we'd had weeks and weeks and thousands of dollars we could've put into making her well again, I also know that Thelma -- who hated strangers and change and wouldn't come out from the bathroom cabinet for *days* after we moved here -- would probably have been frightened and miserable if we'd had her taken away and put in an animal hospital with a bunch of strangers. It's hard to choose something like this, even when you really know it's the only choice, so I really just hope we didn't prolong her suffering too much while we came to the decision and then spent that last bit of time with her to say goodbye; I'd hate to think we made it worse for her just to make it easier for us, but we did try.
We loved her and we miss her, and I wish her lots of heavy pine trees and fat, slow mice in the next world. Goodbye, Thelma.
I came home Saturday night and Mary was worried about our cat Thelma, who hadn't been interested in dinner and was seeming listless. We fussed a little, but it didn't seem like an emergency. When I got up Sunday morning, she still wouldn't eat -- and she wouldn't move, and she would barely lift her head, and she was making these miserable noises. Mary and I both bolted out of bed like crazy people; I put on a sweater that I was literally wearing inside out the entire rest of the day, and we were calling around trying to find a vet that would see Thelma on a Sunday.
Long story short, she was really, really sick -- some kind of liver failure, the vet said, although it would've required lots and lots of bloodwork and whatnot to figure out exactly what was wrong, and then hospitalization, etc. etc. They gave her an IV to put some fluids back in, but basically, it was a lost cause. From hearing at sometime around 10:30 on Saturday night that my cat wasn't feeling well, at one o'clock the next afternoon we were petting her little ears while the vet put her to sleep. It was just so fucking fast, you know? I've had cats all my life, and I know they don't live forever, but it was the incredible shock of the whole thing that made this one particularly hard to deal with.
Thelma was not quite eleven years old. She was a rescue cat, from a ditch back in Tipton, Georgia, and she was a little OCD and fairly shy around people, especially compared to her attention-whore of a sister, Louise. Over the four years I lived with her, she got tons braver around people, to where she would come out from under the bed when there were visitors in the house and even occasionally venture outside on the balcony. She was almost as much of a lap cat as the others by the time she died.
We buried her at a friend's house on Sunday afternoon, wrapped in a blanket with the toy mouse that she loved beyond all reason and would drag from one end of the house to the other, making her yowling hunting noise. She liked to be hidden; when we had a Christmas tree up, she loved to be under it and watch the world from her little sheltered spot, so I hope she'd be cool with having her remains there under the trees. The other two cats are a little freaked by her disappearance, and I wish I had some way of explaining to them, because no doubt it's scary for them. Seishirou still sits there when I feed them, waiting around for Thelma to come eat first like he always did, which sort of kills me.
I was pretty much leveled yesterday, and today I'm feeling quite a lot better, but it's still hard to realize how fast it all happened, and all those things we did with her over the last week that were the last time and we didn't realize it. I wish she hadn't had to be in so much pain right there at the end, and though a part of me wishes we'd had weeks and weeks and thousands of dollars we could've put into making her well again, I also know that Thelma -- who hated strangers and change and wouldn't come out from the bathroom cabinet for *days* after we moved here -- would probably have been frightened and miserable if we'd had her taken away and put in an animal hospital with a bunch of strangers. It's hard to choose something like this, even when you really know it's the only choice, so I really just hope we didn't prolong her suffering too much while we came to the decision and then spent that last bit of time with her to say goodbye; I'd hate to think we made it worse for her just to make it easier for us, but we did try.
We loved her and we miss her, and I wish her lots of heavy pine trees and fat, slow mice in the next world. Goodbye, Thelma.
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Date: 2006-10-24 04:02 am (UTC)From: