I need hugs.
1/18/19 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kateWe put Fatty down today.
He'd been doing okay? We had a wellness panel done and it came back weird - they said there was a clot so they wanted to run it again. That was two months ago and I never got him back in because he was doing fine - absolutely normal - until suddenly he wasn't. He'd started to get picky about food when we started giving him wet food in order to give him some more liquid (recommended by the vet), and then he started eating less and less, and two days ago stopped eating altogether. (He'd done this before and it sucked but we'd nursed him back to health.)
So we went to the vet. An emergency visit, sure, but nothing serious.
Uh, no. We sat around for half an hour waiting for test results. The physical exam had revealed one hard stool in his bowels (he hadn't eaten enough to poo for a few days), and his eyes weren't reacting to light very much (that should've had me worried, and it did, but not enough). His slight heart murmur, which he'd never had before, should have alerted me too. It didn't. I am stupidly optimistic.
When the vet came back in, she told us that his kidneys had shut down. He wasn't eating because he couldn't process the food, and all the stuff his kidneys weren't filtering out was ending up in his blood - which was "sludgey" and probably the reason the last blood had gotten a clot - not a misdraw, as the vet had led me to believe.
She was very kind but also absolutely firm that it was Fatty's time. His kidneys had just quit; there was nothing to do for him at this point and we really needed to think about his quality of life.
If it had been just me, I might have asked to take him home overnight, to let us and the other cats just spend a little more time with him. My wife didn't want to do that. She didn't say why but I assume it's because she thought it'd be harder. It probably would have. So ten minutes after we'd gotten the completely shocking news that our cat was dying, we watched as the vet put him down. I have only ever done that twice in my life and both times it was absolutely heartbreaking. I know I'll do it again but it just fucking sucks and now I'm going to go get drunk and play Overcooked II with my fluffy cat on my lap. He's the only one that seemed to notice something was wrong when we got home with an empty cat carrier.
He'd been doing okay? We had a wellness panel done and it came back weird - they said there was a clot so they wanted to run it again. That was two months ago and I never got him back in because he was doing fine - absolutely normal - until suddenly he wasn't. He'd started to get picky about food when we started giving him wet food in order to give him some more liquid (recommended by the vet), and then he started eating less and less, and two days ago stopped eating altogether. (He'd done this before and it sucked but we'd nursed him back to health.)
So we went to the vet. An emergency visit, sure, but nothing serious.
Uh, no. We sat around for half an hour waiting for test results. The physical exam had revealed one hard stool in his bowels (he hadn't eaten enough to poo for a few days), and his eyes weren't reacting to light very much (that should've had me worried, and it did, but not enough). His slight heart murmur, which he'd never had before, should have alerted me too. It didn't. I am stupidly optimistic.
When the vet came back in, she told us that his kidneys had shut down. He wasn't eating because he couldn't process the food, and all the stuff his kidneys weren't filtering out was ending up in his blood - which was "sludgey" and probably the reason the last blood had gotten a clot - not a misdraw, as the vet had led me to believe.
She was very kind but also absolutely firm that it was Fatty's time. His kidneys had just quit; there was nothing to do for him at this point and we really needed to think about his quality of life.
If it had been just me, I might have asked to take him home overnight, to let us and the other cats just spend a little more time with him. My wife didn't want to do that. She didn't say why but I assume it's because she thought it'd be harder. It probably would have. So ten minutes after we'd gotten the completely shocking news that our cat was dying, we watched as the vet put him down. I have only ever done that twice in my life and both times it was absolutely heartbreaking. I know I'll do it again but it just fucking sucks and now I'm going to go get drunk and play Overcooked II with my fluffy cat on my lap. He's the only one that seemed to notice something was wrong when we got home with an empty cat carrier.
For easy organization later:
no subject
on 1/19/19 04:23 am (UTC)