Doing the right thing

Our 15-year-old kitty, Puff the Magic Kitty, hasn't been herself for the last couple of days. She is our oldest baby, about a year older than our son, and we adore her. She is white, medium-hair, with a bobbed tail (an accident at birth, perhaps), and has dark markings on her back and sides that look exactly like a little poodle is riding piggy-back. She is THE most beautiful cat in the universe. Not the most cuddly cat in the world, Puff adores being petted but not carried. She is not a lap kitty, but when I had my foot surgery a couple of years back, she slept beside me every night as long as I was on pain meds, as if to make sure I was still breathing. When Oren was a baby, she and her sister Harriet (who died nine years ago from kidney failure) would crawl into his stroller and sleep, and when Oren was sleeping in his bouncy/vibrating seat, they would watch him, silent sentinels observing the baby human.

Several months ago, we were sure we were losing our Puff. She started throwing up, not just her normal couple-times-a-week purging, but everything in her stomach and then some. She stopped eating and drinking, and then she started wobbling and looking unbalanced and dissheveled. The most distressing symptom was the lack of purring. Puff is a purr box. You look at her, smile, and her engines start humming. But for a day or so, not a purr was to be found. We knew it was the end. We took her to the vet, who couldn't diagnose anything acutely wrong, and then took her back home, prepared to lose her. Rick and I even walked in the yard looking for a good burial plot. I haven't cried that hard since.

And then miraculously, Puff felt just fine, thank you very much. We figure a couple of things happened. First, she probably heard us talking about digging a hole, and snapped out of it. Second, during all of this drama, we completely changed her food from a tiny bit of wet food in the evenings (for her heart meds) and dry the rest of the time to an all-wet diet.

Yeah, she probably played us a little bit...

But regardless, we had our Puff back and we were glad. She gave us another scare a month or so later, but never stopped purring, so we felt like she would be OK. And then day before yesterday, she started throwing up and stopped eating. I cleaned up ten or more puddles of vomit on the floor (this is why we don't have and will never voluntarily have carpet in a house). I had scheduled a nail trim anyway, so yesterday I took her in and had the vet examine her.

Once again, nothing startlingly acute came back, but Puff's kidneys aren't completely healthy, and she may have an infection. Both issues can be helped with meds, but one of them is an oral medication, which scares me to death. Giving a cat a pill or a tincture is a nightmare, and Puff gets so stressed out that I wonder if we'll do more harm than good. There are other things we can do as well, including injections of anti-acid medication and subcutaneous fluids, which we can also administer at home.

But how much is too much? While the notion of giving her an injection or two isn't abhorrent in any way to me (probably because I have no problem with needles and have never thought shots of any kind were all that painful), I wonder how she would feel. Would she start to hide whenever I approached? Or would she feel so much better that it would be worth it? I just don't know.

I want to do the right thing by her, and I feel like she has a lot of life left in her, but she is a kitty and by virtue of her feline status, I believe she deserves to be treated as kindly and humanely as possible, which precludes anything unnecessarily invasive just to make us humans feel better and less guilty.

Yesterday at the vet (thankfully I got the good vet instead of the fresh-out-of-vet-school-vet who wants to do every test and every intervention known to man), I asked Puff if she would please tell me when it is time for her to go. I've never had to put a pet down for old age, so I don't know if I'll recognize the signs. Even the vet said that she didn't think Puff was there yet. Maybe if she stops purring completely we'll recognize it as a sign.

When we thought we were going to lose her back in December, I told Rick that no matter what sort of pain we would experience by her loss, it was worth it as a tiny payment for the enormity of joy that little creature has brought into our world.

This is the price we pay for love.